The Baltimore Sun carries a lengthy examination of the state's death penalty, "Death penalty moratorium leaves survivors, convicts in limbo; Capital punishment opponents see momentum for repeal." It's by Julie Bykowicz.
Maryland is one of 35 states with a capital punishment law, has five men on death row and is prosecuting a half dozen new capital cases. But no one has been put to death in more than five years, and the slow writing and rewriting of execution protocols has imposed a de facto moratorium on capital punishment that appears unlikely to end anytime soon.
Last week, state prison officials told lawmakers they need more time to work on the protocols — a task that so far has spanned the entire administration of Gov. Martin O'Malley, a death penalty opponent. The latest hangup: One of the chemicals used in lethal injections is no longer available in the United States.
Death penalty opponents announced recently that they have found more legislative support than ever for repeal. Leaders in the General Assembly say the bill is not likely to pass this year, but a Senate made more liberal in last fall's election and a sympathetic governor have activists believing an end to capital punishment is on the horizon.
O'Malley said the shortage of the chemical sodium thiopental "underscores what a laborious and complicated and time-consuming, resource-wasting legal process goes into carrying out the death penalty."
"Our dollars are better spent on crime-fighting measures that we know work," the governor said in an interview last week. Still, he says he has no immediate plans to push for repeal, and won't follow the lead of former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, who in 2003 commuted to life sentences the state's entire death row.
So Maryland will remain in the murky state of having capital punishment but not carrying it out, leaving victims' families and prosecutors frustrated.
And:
In May 2002, Gov. Parris N. Glendening ordered a moratorium on the death penalty while the University of Maryland studied the way it had been applied in the state. The researchers found that capital punishment had been applied unevenly and inherently biased against black defendants.
Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. lifted the moratorium soon after taking office in January 2003. Two men were executed under his watch; five men in total have been put to death in Maryland since a national ban on capital punishment ended in 1976.
In December 2006, Maryland's highest court ruled that the state could not continue carrying out executions until it developed protocols for how the lethal injections were administered. By then O'Malley, a lifelong death penalty opponent, had been elected and was waiting to take office.
After a push for repeal by death penalty opponents fell short in 2008, the legislature ordered another study, this time led by former U.S. Attorney General Benjamin R. Civiletti. The Civiletti commission found geographic and racial disparities in the way capital punishment is applied in Maryland, and recommended abolishing it.
The next year, O'Malley spearheaded an impassioned effort for repeal. It ended in a compromise of sorts, with the closely divided Senate narrowing the cases in which a prosecutor can seek death to those with DNA evidence, a videotape of the crime or a videorecorded confession by the killer.
Earlier coverage from Maryland begins at the link. Coverage of the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment, informally referred to as the Civiletti Commission, begins here.
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