Maryland will be 18th state to ban death penalty

Michael Winter, USA TODAY | USATODAY

Maryland's General Assembly on Friday completed its repeal of the death penalty, nearly 40 years after the U.S. Supreme Court restored capital punishment.

The House of Delegates' 82-56 vote followed Senate approval last week.

Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat who proposed the repeal, will sign the measure into law next month, his office said Friday afternoon. That will make Maryland the 18th state to overturn capital punishment since it was reintroduced in 1976.

The governor will enact the measure after the end of the legislative session, which concludes at midnight April 8, aides said.

The state last executed an inmate in 2005. Maryland's highest court halted lethal injection in December 2006, ruling that the legislature had not properly approved the procedures.

Five men have been executed in the past 37 years.

Maryland has five men on death row, all convicted of murder. The oldest crime dates back to 1983.

The repeal calls for converting death sentences to life without parole, but it also gives the governor the ability to "commute or change a sentence of death into a specified period of confinement."

In a statement, O'Malley said he would make a "case-by-case decision.

The governor, who pushed the repeal since taking office in 2007, said the General Assembly's action ended a policy that "is proven not to work."

"Evidence shows that the death penalty is not a deterrent, it cannot be administered without racial bias, and it costs three times as much as life in prison without parole," he said. "What's more, there is no way to reverse a mistake if an innocent person is put to death."

The NAACP and the Catholic Church were among the groups that organized to end executions.

"I applaud the Maryland General Assembly for choosing to meet evil not with evil, but with a justice worthy of our best nature as human beings," Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore said in a statement.

"As people of faith who live in a civilized nation, we recognize that those who have done great harm to others deserve punishment," he said. "However, we must also recognize that every life has value, and that we cannot overcome crime by executing criminals, nor can we restore the lives of the innocent by ending the lives of those convicted of their murders."

But, as The Baltimore Sun points out, voters may have the final say if death-penalty supporters gather enough petition signatures to put the issue on the 2014 ballot. Polls show a narrow majority of state voters support capital punishment.

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous told the Sun that should the issue go to a referendum, "We are committed to going the distance. This is one of our biggest state-level priorities this year and it will remain so until it is clear it is completely over."

Nationwide, death sentences have declined by 75% and executions by 60% since the 1990s, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.