THE FATE of Wesley Eugene Baker, a death row inmate, is now in the hands of Maryland's highest court. We hope that the Court of Appeals justices won't tolerate a penalty that has been shown to be seriously flawed - in both racial and geographic terms - in its application around the state. At the least, they should allow a lower court to consider whether those inconsistencies tainted Mr. Baker's case.
Mr. Baker, a black man who is now 47, was convicted of killing a 49-year-old white woman, Jane Tyson, in a shopping mall parking lot and was sentenced to death in 1992. He's one of five of the state's eight death row inmates who are using a major study by a University of Maryland criminologist to try to overturn their sentences.
That 2003 study by professor Raymond Paternoster showed inconsistencies in how death sentences are handed out in the state. Defendants, particularly blacks, who kill whites are much more likely to be charged with capital murder and sentenced to death than those who kill nonwhites. The study also showed that jurisdiction matters: Prosecutors in Baltimore County, for instance, are 13 times more likely to seek the death penalty than are prosecutors in the city.