Gov. Josh Shapiro is continuing the pattern Pennsylvania’s executives have perfected over the last 24 years.

On Thursday, Shapiro said he will continue following in his predecessors’ footsteps by not permitting executions to move forward. Pennsylvania will continue being a death penalty state that does not put people to death.

He is taking it one step further, however. Shapiro is encouraging the state’s lawmakers to pass a bill removing capital punishment from the prosecutorial arsenal.

The move would change little about how the state actually punishes prisoners convicted of the most heinous crimes. Gary Michael Heidnik was executed in July 1999. He was exactly the criminal the death penalty seemed tailor-made to end — the serial killer, rapist and torturer who was the blueprint for horror movie villain “Buffalo Bill” from “Silence of the Lambs.”

There are 101 people awaiting death in Pennsylvania’s prisons. They are all men. They are 46% Black, 44% white, 10% Hispanic and 1% Asian. They do not represent 101 murders; 26 of them have multiple death sentences. The most are the dozen for George Banks for the 1982 Wilkes-Barre killing spree that remains the state’s worst mass shooting.

There are seven Allegheny County cases, including one of the oldest in the state. Leroy Fears was sentenced in 1995 for killing Shawn Hagan, 12, in Hazelwood. There are five Westmoreland County death row inmates; the most recent is Rahmael Holt, convicted in 2020 of the 2017 killing of New Kensington police Officer Brian Shaw.

Pennsylvania tells them they are on a clock, with a short stay at Rockview’s death house at the end. History says that is unlikely. Before Heidnik, only two others were executed since 1976.

Shapiro’s vow will make him the fifth governor not to employ the penalty. Although Republican Tom Corbett did sign death warrants for several prisoners, he also issued at least one stay. Other executions were stopped by convoluted court processes.

Is Pennsylvania a death penalty state? It doesn’t seem like it. The youngest person on death row is Davone Anderson, sentenced last year in Cumberland County at age 27.

The Keystone State is not executing anyone. It is slowly marching them to the grave in a concrete box over the course of decades. That is called life imprisonment, and it requires a lot less time in court.

If that is the state’s goal, it should say so and change the law accordingly.

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