Today's Washington Post has, "Md. Death Penalty Is No Easy Target," by John Wagner.
As he asks lawmakers today to support his bill to repeal Maryland's death penalty, Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) will be heading down a road rife with political pitfalls with no clear path toward success.
A majority of Marylanders still support capital punishment. The General Assembly remains bitterly divided over the issue. And O'Malley will be testifying to the same Senate committee that killed similar legislation in each of the past two years.
In an interview, the governor, a Catholic who has long opposed capital punishment, acknowledged the challenges ahead but said he considers himself "hard-wired" to seek a different outcome.
"At the end of the day, the only sure guarantee one has in these honorable jobs of public service is being able to look at yourself in the mirror and know you did your very best, so that's what I'm trying to do," O'Malley said. "I'm really not looking for a medal. I'm not looking for applause. I just believe that it's the right thing to do, and therefore I must try."
Throughout his political career, as mayor of Baltimore and as governor, O'Malley has shown a willingness to gamble. In late 2007, less than a year into office as governor, he summoned lawmakers to Annapolis for a special session on taxes, budget cuts and slot machine gambling without first securing enough votes for any of his initiatives, all of which passed largely intact.
Repealing the death penalty during the current 90-day session might prove the heavier lift, though some of O'Malley's longtime friends said they are not surprised that he is trying.
"When he feels like there's a fundamental injustice, when something strikes him that way, he acts on it," said Michael Drayne, a Silver Spring banker who was a high school classmate of O'Malley's at Gonzaga College High School, a Jesuit-run school in the District. "When he sees issues that way, he's comfortable going with his instincts."
Maryland has executed five people since it reinstated the death penalty in 1978. Five inmates are on death row. The state has had a de facto moratorium on capital punishment since December 2006, the month before O'Malley took office, after the state's highest court ruled that procedures for lethal injection had not been properly adopted. O'Malley has declined to issue regulations allowing executions to resume but has indicated a willingness to do so if his bill is fully considered and defeated this year.
In late 2007, New Jersey became the first state in a generation to abolish the death penalty; others are considering it. The New Mexico House of Delegates voted last week to repeal the death penalty, sending the legislation to the Senate. Fourteen states and the District do not have the death penalty.
In Virginia, lawmakers are considering expanding eligibility for capital punishment to people who assist in murders but do not commit the killings and to people convicted of murdering fire marshals or auxiliary police officers who are on duty. It is unclear whether Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), who opposes capital punishment, would sign the bills into law.
O'Malley is scheduled to appear today before the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, where a senator's repeal bill fell one vote short of approval in 2007. O'Malley testified before the committee that year, too, but this is the first time he is personally sponsoring a bill. The senators on the 11-member committee have not changed in the past two years, and none has announced a switch in position.
And:
Aides attribute O'Malley's steadfastness on the death penalty in part to the example of his father-in-law, J. Joseph Curran, a former Maryland attorney general.
Early in his political career, Curran spoke out on several civil rights issues before such stands were commonly accepted. He called for striking Maryland's law against interracial marriage and for enacting laws to require the sale of homes to people regardless of race. As attorney general, Curran also advocated for death penalty repeal, without imperiling his electability.
In his Raw Fisher Washington Post blog, Marc Fisher writes, "O'Malley, Death Penalty and Maryland's Culture Divide."
Now here's your Maryland cultural divide: That split over capital punishment is not based primarily on party, though only Democrats are supporting O'Malley's bill. Nor is it based mainly on race, though all of the black senators support the repeal. No, the most interesting and possibly most determinative factor in this split is geography--only one senator from Montgomery County, Rob Garagiola from Germantown, and only one from Prince George's County, Senate President Mike Miller (whose district includes all of Calvert County) are listed as voting to keep the death penalty.
As in Virginia, an alliance of city dwellers and residents of suburbs with affluent and highly-educated populations has become a surefire source of liberal positions on social issues, while Maryland's rural and more conservative suburban residents are represented by politicians who are more likely to be anti-abortion, pro-death penalty and strongly in favor of gun rights. In Maryland, that increasingly means that the senators and delegates from the large Washington suburban counties side with those from Baltimore City to form a dependable bloc on most social issues. In the case of the capital punishment vote, 17 of the 19 Yes votes for O'Malley's proposal are from those three jurisdictions (the other two are from Anne Arundel County and Baltimore County, the suburban area that surrounds the city.)
But also as in Virginia, there are issues where that seemingly natural connection between Baltimore and the D.C. suburbs snaps apart. The two areas are rivals for transportation and school funding, and far more so than in Virginia, Maryland's two major population centers compete for political power in the state capital. The power divide in Richmond is much more urban vs. rural, whereas in Annapolis, the story of the next few years will be that of Baltimore trying to hold on to its traditional stranglehold on state power against the surging demographic dominance of the Washington suburbs.
"Study says Death Penalty Costs the State Big Bucks," is in the Baltimore City Paper.
Maryland’s giant budget deficit may be Gov. Martin O’Malley’s biggest problem, but it could help him achieve one of his other top targets this year: abolishing the death penalty.
Capital punishment has long been known as costly, a fact that could have greater significance then ever to lawmakers in Annapolis as the economy continues to deteriorate.
The Democratic governor, who has already introduced legislation to repeal the statute, faces a tough political battle, with lawmakers split on the issue. He may find some solace, however, in a 2008 report by the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment.
The blue-ribbon panel of legal experts concluded that it costs significantly more to litigate a death-penalty case and to house inmates on death row than it does to litigate and imprison an inmate facing life without parole. It costs $1.1 million to prosecute a death-penalty eligible case in which the death penalty is not sought, compared with $3 million for a case in which the death penalty is sought, the commission reported.
The panel based much of its economic analysis on a study carried out by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. Its economists concluded that the ongoing cost of death-penalty cases in Maryland prosecuted between 1978 and 1999, most of which have not resulted in an execution, will be upwards of $186 million.
In his State of the State speech in January, O’Malley made clear his views when he referred to the death penalty as “outdated, expensive, and utterly ineffective.” Spokeswoman Christine Hansen says in an interview that the governor’s long-held opposition to the death penalty goes way beyond concerns about cost, but she notes that the commission’s conclusion about the expense of capital punishment “is part of the reasoning” for seeking to abolish it. “Of course it will be part of the conversation” with lawmakers, Hansen adds.
Abolishing the death penalty would not resolve the state’s $2 billion budget shortfall, but the Urban Institute study notes that it would allow the state not only to save money, but also to re-allocate resources for other purposes.
Supporters of the death penalty, including some members of the state commission, don’t buy into that methodology, but John Roman, lead author of the Urban Institute report, leaps to its defense.
He says that state-funded defense attorneys now representing death-penalty inmates could instead work on other criminal matters within the state public-defender’s office. “That’s of substantial benefit to the state of Maryland,” Roman says. The current economic climate can only help underline that argument, he says.
Earlier coverage of the Maryland legislation begins with this post, yesterday. The Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment issued it's final report, in December, urging abolition.
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