(Reuters) - The Maryland House of Delegates voted on Friday to overturn the state's death penalty, putting it a step closer to becoming the 18th U.S. state to abolish executions.
By a vote of 82 to 56, the House agreed to replace capital punishment with a sentence of life without parole. It approved the measure a week after the Senate passed the bill.
Governor Martin O'Malley, who has pledged to sign the bill into law, will decide the fate of the five men currently on Maryland's death row.
The bill was O'Malley's second attempt to overturn capital punishment since 2009. When he introduced the legislation in January, he said the death penalty was expensive and did not work.
"Year after year, states which have a death penalty have actually had a higher murder rate than states which do not have a death penalty," he said.
The governor also pointed to a 2008 study conducted by the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment that found the state's death penalty sentencing to be racially biased. Of the five men currently serving time on Maryland's death row, four are African-Americans whose victims were white.
But some Maryland legislators insist the death penalty is necessary to bring justice to victims and their families.
Republican Delegate Gail Bates said she planned to vote against the repeal because she believed a maximum term of life in prison simply was not enough.
"Lawyers will bargain down from that, instead of bargaining down from the death penalty," she said.
Bates said she also feared for the safety of correctional officers, who are at risk of being attacked by lifelong criminals with little to lose.
Another opponent, Republican Delegate Kathy Afzali, said: "I am someone who believes that there are some crimes that are so heinous and so horrible that they do deserve the death penalty."
Her attempt to amend the bill to allow the death penalty in extreme cases, such as mass killings and school shootings, was voted down on Wednesday.
Since Maryland reinstated the death penalty in 1978, some 58 people have been sentenced to death, while only five sentences have been carried out, according to Jane Henderson, executive director of the nonprofit Maryland Citizens Against State Executions. Henderson said the vast majority of sentences were changed to life without parole.
Maryland's last execution took place in 2005.
Five states - Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, New York, and New Jersey - have repealed the death penalty since 2007, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. A total of 17 U.S. states have put an end to state-sanctioned executions.
Source: Reuters, March 15, 2013
Maryland General Assembly repeals death penalty
The House of Delegates voted 82-56 to repeal Maryland’s death penalty on Friday, making the state the sixth in as many years to abolish executions and delivering a major legislative victory to Gov. Martin O’Malley.
The bill, which passed the Senate last week, now heads to the governor for his signature. O’Malley (D) has lobbied lawmakers for years to end capital punishment, and he put the full weight of his office behind it this session.
The House vote followed more than two hours of impassioned debate, in which repeal supporters argued that any risk of executing an innocent person is unacceptable and that the death penalty has been applied unfairly in the past.
“Human beings cannot devise a system of justice that is perfect,” said Del. Anne Healey (D-Prince George’s). “We are all flawed. ... What I can’t live with is, if we make a mistake, it costs somebody else his life.”
Opponents of the bill countered that capital punishment can be an important law-enforcement tool and should be kept on the books for heinous cases, several of which were recounted in graphic detail during the debate.
“I wish that we did not need the death penalty ... but I’ve seen the worst of the worst, and I know it’s necessary,” Del. C.T. Wilson (D-Charles), a former prosecutor, told his colleagues.
O’Malley’s bill will replace death sentences with life terms in prison without the possibility of parole. It does not affect the five inmates now on death row, leaving it to the governor to determine whether to commute their sentences.
“I’ve felt compelled to do everything I could to change our law, repeal the death penalty, so that we could focus on doing the things that actually work to reduce violent crime,” O’Malley said in an interview.
Friday’s vote was hailed by the NAACP and Catholic Church, two organizations whose vocal support helped build momentum in recent weeks.
Maryland voters could still get the final say on the measure, however. A provision in the state constitution allows citizens to petition recently passed laws to the ballot, as happened with same-sex marriage legislation last year.
Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) has said the death penalty is likely to be placed on the 2014 ballot, though no group has announced plans to spearhead an organized effort to collect signatures.
The outcome of a ballot measure would be far from certain. A Washington Post poll released last month showed that a majority of Marylanders want to keep the death penalty despite widespread skepticism as to whether capital punishment is a deterrent to murder or is applied fairly.
During debate in the House this week — and in the Senate last week — both sides have used horrific crimes to try to gain leverage.
Lawmakers arguing to keep the death penalty have recounted the killing of Sarah Foxwell, an 11-year-old who was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and slain on the Eastern Shore in 2009.
Supporters of repeal have countered with repeated references to Kirk Bloodsworth, a former death-row inmate who was exonerated by DNA evidence and released from prison in 1993. Bloodsworth, a former Marine convicted of raping and murdering a 9-year-old girl in Baltimore County in 1984, was back in the House gallery on Friday, watching the proceedings unfold.
While the death penalty remains on the books in 33 states, many are using it more sparingly than in the past. Last year, 77 people were sentenced to death nationally, the second-lowest number since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Maryland has not executed a prisoner since 2005, during the tenure of O’Malley’s Republican predecessor, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R).
Critics have accused O’Malley of repeatedly using delay tactics to avoid executions.
The state has had an effective moratorium on capital punishment since December 2006, the month before O’Malley took office, when Maryland’s highest court ruled that regulations on lethal injection had not been properly adopted.
The O’Malley administration has yet to implement new regulations, and the shortage of a drug prescribed in Maryland for executions could now complicate efforts of any future governor to resume executions.
O’Malley — who rose to political prominence as a tough-on-crime mayor in Baltimore — has advocated for repeal of capital punishment since taking office in 2007. Prior to this year, he last sponsored a bill for that purpose in 2009. That measure was rejected by the Senate, with members choosing instead to tighten evidentiary standards in capital cases.
Since then, several new senators have been elected, and a couple of members changed their positions, creating a majority of Senate supporters for the first time. Several lawmakers have suggested their attempt to “fix” the death penalty in 2009 was insufficient.
The Senate vote last week was 27 to 20.
Source: Washington Post, March 15, 2013
Maryland death row prisoners in limbo as state votes to repeal death penalty
Five death row prisoners in the state of Maryland are now in a state of legal limbo after the state's House of Delegates voted on Friday to repeal the death penalty, making its abolition now certain.
[T]he reform will lead the state's existing five capital inmates stuck where, in the case of three of them, they have been since 1983 – on death row. The repeal will not be retroactive, and any move to commute their sentences to life without parole can only be made by O'Malley himself or by the courts.
The five men – John Booth-El, Vernon Lee Evans, Anthony Grandison (all put on death row in 1983), Heath Burch (1995) and Jody Miles (1997) – will not be able to draw much succor from the example of governors in other abolition states, as their approaches have differed. In the case Illinois, which repealed the practice in 2011, every prisoner on death row had their death sentences commuted to life by the governor.
On the other hand, Connecticut and New Mexico decided to leave their death row inmates where they were.
With repeal now inevitable, all eyes will turn to O'Malley for any clues as to his thinking about what to do with the five.
Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, one of the country's foremost experts on capital punishment, said he expected O'Malley to close death row entirely. "I would be surprised if he left the five men there – to leave people on death row while no future sentences are given would be quite extreme."
Maryland has been one of the least active death-penalty states in the US, with its last execution taking place in 2005 and no new death sentences meted out since O'Malley entered the governor's mansion in 2007.
Source: The Guardian, March 15, 2013