Death Penalty Remains Issue of Debate

Lawmakers to Weigh Creating Study and Ending Execution

It was 1933, and a ruckus was brewing around Euel Lee, 59, the likes of which Maryland had never seen over the impending death of a condemned black man.

Save Euel Lee! Save Euel Lee!" the protesters chanted as they marched on the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the convicted ax murderer, who was also known as Orphan Jones.

Lee had been convicted two years earlier of killing his former boss in Ocean City. A guilty verdict in the first trial was appealed and a second trial ordered on the grounds that blacks had been excluded from the jury. A second conviction had brought Lee's supporters to Capitol Hill.

"We came here peacefully to ask the Supreme Court to give equal rights to Negroes and to save life," leader James Green said at the time.

The fight to save Lee's life was waged 11 years after Maryland had discontinued public hangings and 10 years after legislators had centralized executions at the Maryland State Penitentiary, now the Metropolitan Transition Center, in Baltimore.

The state's death penalty statute continues to spark controversy. Lawmakers in Annapolis are expected to vote soon on two measures related to the death penalty -- one to abolish it and one to establish a commission to study its effects, including expense and possible racial disparities.

Proponents of the death penalty say it is not likely to be abolished and call the measure to establish a commission a delay tactic. Opponents say the death penalty is expensive and applied unfairly.

According to corrections records, the state legislature first formally considered the death penalty in 1809, when it established execution as punishment for first-degree, or premeditated, murder. Ninety-nine years later, legislators held that the death penalty was not necessarily to be applied in all such cases.

Maryland, which has five inmates on death row, hasn't put a prisoner to death in nearly four years. No one knows how many executions took place before 1923, the year legislators ordered that they be centralized at what then was the state penitentiary.

The first Maryland execution on record was Oct. 22, 1773, in Frederick, when four "convict servants" were hanged for murder. The state's most recent execution was that of convicted rapist and murderer Steve Oken, 42, by lethal injection June 17, 2004, records show.

Records from the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services show that 83 men have been put to death since 1923, 64 blacks and 19 whites. The youngest was Leonard M. Shockley, 17, of Dorchester County, who was executed in the gas chamber for murder on April 10, 1959. The oldest was Lee of Baltimore, who was hanged Oct. 27, 1933.

The busiest years in the state's death house were 1940 and 1943, when six men were executed each year.