Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley speaks at a rally in support of repealing the state's death penalty in January. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
The Maryland legislature voted Friday to abolish the death penalty, which would make the state the sixth in as many years to end capital punishment and add to a canon of liberal policies recently embraced by state leaders.
The 82 to 56 vote in the House of Delegates, which followed two hours of debate, reflected a growing unease among lawmakers in Maryland and across the country that the risk of putting an innocent person to death remains too great with the death penalty in place.
Eighty Democrats and two Republicans voted to abolish capital punishment in Friday’s vote.
Kirk Bloodsworth draws attention as he sits in on the General Assembly’s debate about capital punishment.
The two-hour debate sets the stage for a final vote Friday on a priority for Gov. Martin O’Malley (D).
Death penalty
The legislation, which passed the Senate last week, now goes to the desk of Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), who claimed a long-sought victory. Aides said he will sign the bill in coming weeks.
Since taking office in 2007, O’Malley has urged lawmakers to end capital punishment. He has also led successful efforts to legalize same-sex marriage, extend in-state college tuition rates to illegal immigrants and raise income taxes on wealthy residents.
In an interview, O’Malley credited the grass-roots lobbying efforts of the NAACP and faith leaders, turnover in the state Senate and some last-minute conversions with helping achieve an objective that had previously eluded him.
“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,” said O’Malley, who rose to political prominence as a tough-on-crime mayor of Baltimore.
Repeal advocates said the win in Maryland — which has five prisoners on death row but hasn’t executed anyone since 2005 — would continue momentum nationally.
Benjamin T. Jealous, president of the NAACP, which has made repeal of the death penalty a national priority, noted that Maryland would become the first state south of the Mason-Dixon line to do away with capital punishment.
“This is a big day for Maryland. It’s a bigger day for the country,” said Jealous, who watched Friday’s vote in Annapolis from the House gallery and appeared at a news conference with O’Malley afterward. “It shows that the anti-death penalty movement is accelerating.”
He said that repeal advocates are within striking distance in Delaware, Colorado, New Hampshire and Kansas.
Although 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.
“State after state is deciding that the death penalty is simply not worth the risks and costs to retain,” Richard Dieter, the executive director of the center, said Friday, predicting that Maryland “won’t be the last” to end capital punishment.
During Friday’s debate in the House, opponents of the repeal bill argued 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.
“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 colleagues.
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