In today's Baltimore Sun, Jennifer McMenamin reports the article, "Voices against death penalty."
A group of relatives of murder victims called on state lawmakers yesterday to repeal the death penalty, complaining that the long appeals process that accompanies capital murder prosecutions drags families through painful delays without delivering the justice that the system initially promises.
Standing with their arms around each other's shoulders and holding photos of their loved ones, 10 people delivered a letter signed by dozens more like them to the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment, which held the third of its four scheduled hearings yesterday in Annapolis. The panel is examining disparities in the application of the death penalty, the cost differential between litigating prolonged capital punishment cases and life imprisonment, and the impact of DNA evidence.
Like many others who spoke at yesterday's five-hour hearing, the victims' family members asked the commission to recommend the replacement of the death penalty with a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
"To be meaningful, justice should be swift and sure. Life without parole, which begins immediately, is both of these; the death penalty is neither," Lisa Delity, a schoolteacher from Bowie, told the commission, reading from the letter signed by 49 Marylanders who have lost relatives to murder. "Capital punishment drags victims' loved ones through an agonizing and lengthy process, holding out the promise of one punishment in the beginning and often resulting in a life sentence in the end anyway."
Emphasizing that their request was based not on universal opposition to capital punishment but out of concern that Maryland's use of the ultimate punishment does more harm than good, the letter writers added, "Though we share different perspectives on the death penalty, every one of us agrees that Maryland's capital punishment system doesn't work for victims' families, and that our state is better off without it."
Commission members also heard yesterday from bishops representing the Roman Catholic, Episcopal and United Methodist churches of Maryland, from a researcher who has studied the cost of the state's death penalty and from a prosecutor and two former prosecutors, all three of whom have handled capital cases but who have come to very different conclusions about its effectiveness.
"Md. Panel Hears Views On Death Penalty," is the Washington Post article by John Wagner.
The cost associated with prosecuting a case in Maryland in which the death penalty is imposed is on average $1.9 million more than the cost of a similar case in which capital punishment is not sought, a researcher told a state commission yesterday.
The analysis was embraced by death penalty opponents, but supporters of capital punishment, including two Maryland prosecutors, vigorously sought to discredit the study by the nonpartisan Washington-based Urban Institute. They argued that the methodology was flawed and cost assumptions greatly inflated.
Joseph Cassilly, the state's attorney for Harford County, said that the study was "so far off the mark as to be incomprehensible and useless" and that it contained "significant errors of math."
Cassilly acknowledged that there are additional costs associated with a death-penalty case but said, "We're talking costs in the thousands of dollars, not in the millions of dollars."
The clash came in the latest in a series of contentious hearings by the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment, which has been asked to present recommendations on the future of the death penalty to Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) and state lawmakers by the end of the year.
The high-profile panel also heard an appeal from the archbishop of Baltimore to replace capital punishment with "a bloodless alternative." Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien, who spoke on behalf of the Maryland Catholic Conference, described himself as "something of a latecomer" to his position.
"I thought it served a purpose," O'Brien said of the death penalty. "If it did nothing else, I thought, it was a deterrent -- the prospect of its imposition would prevent the wrongful taking of human life. But that was then."
O'Brien appeared on a panel of religious leaders that also included Eugene Taylor Sutton, the new bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, who asked the panel: "How, in the end, does killing its citizens help the state to build the nonviolent, just and civil society that we all desire for ourselves and for our children?"
Maryland has had an effective moratorium on the death penalty since the state's highest court ruled in December 2006 that procedures for lethal injection had not been adopted properly. O'Malley, a death penalty opponent, only recently directed his administration to begin the process of drafting new regulations, which are not expected to be issued before the commission completes its work.
Earlier coverage of the Maryland commission is here.
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