Capital Punishment

That was no small development heard the other day from the longtime president of the Maryland Senate, Thomas V. Mike Miller. The white-haired gatekeeper of the General Assembly said he would allow a vote to repeal the death penalty on the Senate floor, presumably bypassing the committee that usually blocks the legislation from getting there. This from the politician who once declared: "If there's a gallows, I'll pull the lever. If there's a gas chamber, I'll turn the valve. If it's lethal injection, I'll insert the needle.

Attorneys challenging a death sentence before the state's highest court last week dug deeply into online historical documents to divine the intention behind what they think is a never-before-interpreted part of the state's constitution. Public defender Brian Saccenti and a team of lawyers rested their argument in part on a once-famous 18th-century book by a young Italian nobleman named Cesare Beccaria, who suggested that capital punishment should be reserved for treasonous criminals.

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller said Wednesday that he will make sure that legislation to repeal Maryland's death penalty gets a vote in his chamber if the governor lines up enough support for approval. Despite his personal support of the death penalty, Miller said, he would give Gov. Martin O'Malley the opportunity to win passage of such legislation — which has been bottled up in a Senate committee. "If he shows me the votes, if he's got the votes on the floor of the Senate, then we'll find a way to move it forward," Miller said in an interview.

After a 45-minute meeting Thursday morning with Gov. Martin O'Malley, NAACP national President Ben Jealous said the governor “supports repeal of the death penalty but wants the civil rights organization to line up support before he decides whether to make the effort an administration priority. Jealous also told reporters after the State House meeting that he plans to meet next week with Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, who could be the pivotal figure in deciding whether a repeal bill gets a floor vote during the General Assembly session that starts next month.

Everyone obviously has an impassioned opinion regarding the death penalty ("Next up: Death penalty," Dec. 3). I have myself wavered in my stance regarding this issue. Is there any benefit to society to repeal the law? If the state retains capital punishment, does it act as a deterrent for people on the street? Does the criminal even think about the consequences before he pulls the trigger and snuffs out the life of another? A writer to The Sun made some significant points regarding abolishing the death penalty ("Time to repeal Maryland death penalty," Dec. 5)

Having successfully pushed for historic changes in Maryland laws regarding expanded casino gambling, in-state college tuition rates for some undocumented-immigrant students, and the right of gay people to marry, Gov. Martin O'Malley is now in a position to address one of the last great pieces of unfinished business of his time in Annapolis: abolishing the state's death penalty. Mr. O'Malley, who opposes capital punishment on religious and practical grounds, reportedly is considering whether to ask the legislature to take up the matter again when it meets in January.

The NAACP is vowing to mount in Annapolis its largest-ever effort to abolish the death penalty in a state, saying Maryland's historic role in the civil rights movement makes it an appropriate place for the push. In an interview, NAACP President Ben Jealous said Maryland is the civil rights organization's top priority in its broader campaign to eliminate capital punishment from the American justice system. He said the group will spend more than it ever has in a state as it rallies citizens to pressure lawmakers for repeal.

In the aftermath of the Aurora, Colo., slaughter, the question went forth on all of the political chatter shows: "Will this reopen the debate over gun control?" That's the script. When heinous monsters kill people with guns, we tend to talk about the problem of guns. Or rather, people in Washington, New York and other big cities tend to talk about the problem of guns because they think guns are the problem. There's an irony there, of course, given that such cities tend to have the worst gun-related murder rates -- Chicago these days has the equivalent of an Aurora every month -- and they are the places where guns are hardest to come by, legally.

When a play bears the title "Lethal Injection," it gets your attention. Michael Reimann's courtroom drama holds your interest, too, even though this Baltimore Playwrights Festival entry at Vagabond Players does not exactly have a light touch with its heavy themes. The play's title and its murder trial setting in a small-town courtroom in Texas might prompt you to think that it will be about the ethical merits of capital punishment. After all, this trial takes place in a state that's known for the frequency with which the death penalty is imposed and carried out. Although the lawyers and various other characters in Reimann's fully populated drama occasionally make direct reference to capital punishment, it's a bit of a surprise that the plot is instead driven by different thematic concerns.

I have spent a lot of my life waiting. I waited for two years to be executed, and I waited in prison for more than eight years — all for a murder I had nothing to do with. After finally being exonerated in 1993, I had to wait 10 years for the DNA that cleared me to be used to bring the real killer to justice. But the longest wait of all has been my two decades since I left prison, prodding and pushing the Maryland General Assembly to end capital punishment in our state once and for all. I am disappointed for yet another year as the legislature will soon adjourn for 2012 without a floor vote in either the House of Delegates or Senate on repealing the death penalty.