Governor signs repeal of death penalty in Md.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Opponents of capital punishment marked a milestone Thursday as Maryland became the first state south of the Mason-Dixon line to abolish the death penalty in nearly 50 years, joining only West Virginia.

The passage was a significant victory for Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Roman Catholic who opposes capital punishment and is considering seeking the 2016 presidential nomination. Death penalty opponents said the governor helped maintain the national momentum of repeal efforts by making Maryland the sixth state in as many years to abolish capital punishment.

"I don't know exactly what the timing is, but over the longer arc of history I think you'll see more and more states repeal the death penalty," O'Malley said in a brief interview after the bill signing. "It's wasteful. It's ineffective. It doesn't work to reduce violent crime."

NAACP President and CEO Ben Jealous, who worked to get the repeal bill passed, noted the significance of a Democratic governor south of the Mason-Dixon line with presidential aspirations leading an effort to ban capital punishment. Jealous noted that in 1992, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton left the presidential campaign trail to oversee the execution of a man who had killed a police officer, a move widely viewed as an effort to shed the Democratic Party's image as soft on crime.

"Our governor has also just redefined what it means to have a political future in this country," Jealous said. "You know, it was just 20 years ago that a young governor with possibilities below the Mason-Dixon stopped during his presidential campaign" to oversee an execution.

West Virginia, which is also south of the Mason-Dixon line, abolished the death penalty in 1965.

Maryland is the 18th state to abolish the death penalty. Neighboring Delaware also made a push to repeal it this year, but the bill has stalled.

Diane Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said Maryland is keeping the momentum going for other states to follow.

"It doesn't always happen overnight," Rust-Tierney said. "The more people study it, the more people understand it. This was a seven-year effort here in Maryland."

Supporters of capital punishment said the governor was taking away an important tool to protect the public. Del. Neil Parrott, a Washington County Republican, criticized the governor for moving ahead with banning the death penalty during the same session as he pushed for a gun-control bill to restrict firearms access to law-abiding citizens.

Parrott, who is chairman of a group called MDPetitions.com, scheduled a news conference on Friday to announce the group's decision on whether to launch a petition drive to try to put the death penalty ban on the ballot for voters to decide in 2014. He declined to say Thursday what the decision will be. They would need to get one-third of the 55,736 signatures needed to petition a bill to referendum by midnight May 31 to qualify to move forward.

State Sen. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat and constitutional law professor who opposes the death penalty, said he believes pressure is building around the country to focus law enforcement resources on things that are proven to lower the homicide rate.

"The trend lines are clear," Raskin said. "There's nobody who's adding the death penalty to their state laws. Everybody is taking it away."

Opponents of capital punishment also noted that the state won't have to worry about potentially putting an innocent person to death. Kirk Bloodsworth, a Maryland man who was the first person in the U.S. freed because of DNA evidence after a conviction in a death penalty case, attended the news conference.

The bill will not apply to the five men the state has on death row, but the governor can commute their sentences to life without parole. O'Malley has said he will consider them on a case-by-case basis.

The state's last execution was in 2005, when Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich was in office.

Last year, the Death Penalty Information Center said in an annual report that just four states carried out more than three-fourths of the executions in the United States last year, while another 23 had not put an inmate to death in 10 years.

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Death penalty: A pragmatic case for repeal

Next month Maryland will become the sixth state in six years to abolish the death penalty. The Free State is the first state south of the Mason-Dixon Line to repeal capital punishment, and we believe that other states will soon follow.

There are practical reasons why momentum is steadily shifting toward repeal: The death penalty is expensive, it does not work, and it is administered with a clear racial bias. Repealing it is a matter of justice, a matter of public safety, and a matter of effective governance.

THE MONITOR'S VIEW: Not even Timothy McVeigh

The death penalty does not make Americans stronger or more secure as a people, and it does not make our laws more just. One of the most jarring facts about our modern criminal justice system is that defendants accused of murdering white victims are significantly more likely to face a death sentence than those accused of killing non-white victims.

This was certainly true in Maryland. A 2003 study showed that defendants charged with killing a white victim were significantly more likely to receive a death sentence. In Delaware, recent research revealed that 73 percent of death-row cases since 1972 involved a white victim. This data helped bolster efforts to pass the repeal bill in the Delaware state Senate last month.

The death penalty is also an ineffective deterrent. In 2011, the average murder rate in states with the death penalty, weighted for population, was 4.9 per 100,000 people. In states without it, the weighted murder rate was 4.1 per 100,000 people.

Nevertheless, Maryland taxpayers have spent millions of dollars on death penalty cases each year. Capital punishment in Maryland costs three times as much as life in prison without parole. Every extra dollar spent on the death penalty is a dollar not invested to stop crimes from being committed in the first place, or to support the families of murder victims.

Most troubling is the very real possibility that an innocent person can be put to death – and there is no way to bring a wrongfully executed person back to life. Each year from 2000 and 2011, an average of five death row inmates was exonerated nationwide. In Maryland, between 1995 and 2007, our state’s reversal rate for the death penalty was 80 percent.

This point was driven home nationwide by the case of Troy Davis in Georgia. Davis was put to death in September 2011 even though seven of nine eyewitnesses recanted the testimony that convicted him. On the night of his final appeal in September 2011, the world was watching; the Twitter hashtag #TooMuchDoubt marked the second-most-active Twitter event of the year. According to a Gallup poll released one month after his death, 35 percent of Americans opposed the death penalty – the highest level in nearly 40 years.

Across our ever-more-closely connected world, the majority of public executions now take place in just seven countries: Iran, Iraq, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the United States. Whether one believes that the death penalty is wrong on moral grounds or not, more and more Americans are beginning to realize that capital punishment is wasteful, unjust, and tragically subject to human error.

OPINION: More states correct the mistake of trying juveniles as adults

Besides Delaware, legislators in Colorado, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Kansas are weighing repeal of the death penalty. As momentum continues to shift toward repeal in state after state, there is real hope that America will soon join the rest of the free world in abolishing the death penalty once and for all.

Martin O’Malley is the governor of Maryland. Benjamin Todd Jealous is the president and chief executive officer of the NAACP.

Related stories

• Not Even Timothy McVeigh
• More states correct the mistake of trying juveniles as adults
• The Monitor's View: Connecticut's wise move against the death penalty
• Switching off the death penalty

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Md. lawmakers vote to repeal death penalty

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Maryland lawmakers approved a measure abolishing the death penalty on Friday and sent the bill to Gov. Martin O'Malley, who has long supported banning capital punishment.

The House of Delegates voted 82-56 for legislation already approved by the Senate. Eighty Democrats and two Republicans voted for the bill, which needed 71 to pass. Eighteen Democrats joined 38 Republicans to vote against it.

The vote represented a major win for the Democratic governor, who has pushed for the death penalty's repeal for five years. He is also widely believed to be weighing a presidential bid in 2016.

"We have a moral responsibility to stop doing the things that are wasteful and do not work and that I would argue run contrary to the deeper principles that unite us as Marylanders," O'Malley said, flanked by a group of death penalty opponents, including NAACP President Benjamin Jealous.

Under the bill, life without the possibility of parole would be the most severe sentence in the state.

Supporters of repeal argued that the death penalty is costly, racially biased, a poor deterrent of crime and sometimes wrongfully applied. The possibility of executing the innocent prompted many lawmakers to support the repeal measure.

"I can live with putting to death criminals who committed what are truly grievous and wicked acts against our children, our police, our mothers and our daughters," Delegate Luiz Simmons, D-Montgomery, said on the House floor, "but what I am opposed to and what I can no longer live with is using the death penalty to accidently put to death an innocent man or woman."

Opponents insisted that capital punishment was a necessary tool in punishing those who commit the most egregious crimes.

"This bill is wrong-spirited," said Delegate Michael McDermott, an Eastern Shore Republican. "It's a shame that we will not allow future generations to have the option of putting the absolute worst of the worst to death."

Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person in the United States freed because of DNA evidence after being convicted in a death penalty case, watched the vote from the House gallery. He pumped his arms toward the ceiling when he saw the vote count.

"You can't punish the guilty by walking over an innocent — ever," an elated Bloodsworth said.

Bloodsworth was twice wrongly convicted of a 9-year-old girl's murder, and he spent two years on death row following his first trial. A second trial brought another conviction, although he received a life sentence instead of capital punishment. He was cleared in 1993.

Maryland has five men on death row. The measure would not apply to them retroactively, but the legislation makes clear that the governor can commute their sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole. O'Malley said he would evaluate those cases individually.

Maryland has executed only five inmates since 1976. There were three executions in the 1990s and two under O'Malley's Republican predecessor, Robert Ehrlich.

In contrast, neighboring Virginia has executed 110 inmates since the U.S. Supreme Court restored capital punishment in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. However, Virginia's death row population has dwindled to eight from a peak of 57 in 1995, in part because fewer death sentences are being handed down in the state amid an increased acceptance of life without parole as a reasonable alternative.

"We see Maryland as the bellwether for the direction the rest of the country is headed in," said Diann Rust-Tierney executive director of the National Coalition To Abolish The Death Penalty. "There was an effort, early on, to try to address some of the problems with the death penalty, especially the possibility of executing an innocent man. Maryland has gone the full gamut trying to fix it and realized it can't be fixed."

The state's last execution took place in 2005, during Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich's administration. He resumed executions after a moratorium had been in place pending a 2003 University of Maryland study, which found significant racial and geographic disparity in how the death penalty was carried out.

Capital punishment was put on hold in Maryland after a December 2006 ruling by Maryland's highest court that the state's lethal injection protocols weren't properly approved by a legislative committee. The committee, whose co-chairs oppose capital punishment, has yet to sign off on protocols.

O'Malley, a Catholic, expressed support for repeal legislation in 2007, but it stalled in a Senate committee.

Maryland has a large Catholic population, and the church opposes the death penalty.

In 2009, lawmakers tightened the law to reduce the chances of an innocent person being sent to death row by restricting capital punishment to murder cases with biological evidence such as DNA, videotaped evidence of a murder or a videotaped confession.

The center said death sentences have declined by 75 percent and executions by 60 percent nationally since the 1990s.

O'Malley's signing of the measure would make Maryland the 18th state to ban the death penalty. Connecticut did so last year. Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York also have abolished it in recent years.

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