As a police chief in New Jersey, James P. Abbott believed in the death penalty.
He supported capital punishment as a way of protecting not only the public, but specifically his fellow officers and the correctional guards working in prisons.
Then he spent a year serving on a New Jersey commission that studied the death penalty, and he completely reversed his view.
"It turned out that what sounded good in theory was actually a complete failure in practice," he told members of Maryland's capital punishment commission yesterday in Annapolis. He noted that he was most influenced by the suffering that victims' families endure through years of appeals and reversals in capital murder cases. "And I am convinced that there is simply no way to fix it and make it right."
Abbott was one of seven expert witnesses and about two dozen members of the public - including former Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. - to testify at yesterday's hearing. It was the last such meeting before the commission begins discussing and formulating the recommendations that it must present to the governor and General Assembly by mid-December.
The panel also heard expert testimony yesterday from the attorney who heads the forensics division of Maryland's Office of the Public Defender and a top public defender in Baltimore County, the jurisdiction where prosecutors have sought more death sentences than anywhere else in the state.
Patrick Kent, the forensics chief, highlighted instances of crime lab analysts' incompetence and misconduct as well as discredited science that have contributed to wrongful convictions over the years. He warned commission members that DNA and other forensic sciences should play an important role in criminal court cases but cannot ensure an infallible system that convicts only the guilty.
"Is Maryland immune? It is not because we, too, base our science on the frailty of human beings," he said. He later added, "The only way we can say we are not executing the innocent is simply not to execute."
Donald E. Zaremba, the deputy Baltimore County public defender who has handled capital cases, told commission members that spiraling caseloads make it difficult to devote the necessary amount of time to death penalty cases as well as the more routine cases.
