Just about a year ago today Gov. John Kitzhaber placed a moratorium on executions in this state, effectively halting Gary Haugen’s drive to become the first person to reach Oregon’s death chamber in more than a decade. At the time the governor said he hoped the move would push Oregonians into a discussion about the death penalty that would lead to a more fair, less expensive alternative.

Now state Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, has taken up the challenge. He plans to introduce a bill in the next legislative session that would ask Oregonians to eliminate the penalty. It would be replaced by a prison sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Kitzhaber, long an opponent of the death penalty, has been the only Oregon governor to oversee an execution since LeeRoy Sanford McGahuey went to the gas chamber in 1962. He had been convicted of the 1961 execution of his landlady and her child.

Oregonians outlawed the penalty two years later by a 60 percent margin, and then-Gov. Mark O. Hatfield commuted the sentences of three death row inmates. Among them was Jeannace June Freeman, who was convicted in Jefferson County of throwing her lover’s son off the U.S. Highway 97 bridge across the Crooked River Gorge. At the time Freeman was the only woman ever sentenced to die in the state. A second woman was sentenced to die last year.

Voters reinstated the penalty in 1978, only to have it overturned by the state Supreme Court in 1981. In 1984 voters amended the constitution to put the death penalty in place once again.

Since then, only two men have been executed, both while Kitzhaber was governor. Deschutes County’s Randy Guzek, meanwhile, is still years away from execution for the 1987 murders of Rod and Lois Houser, even if he does not win the right to a fifth trial on the matter.

Oregonians have not weighed in on the penalty since 1984, though if Greenlick is successful they will again in 2014. Whether they will buy Greenlick’s two-pronged argument that execution is both expensive and morally reprehensible remains to be seen.