NEWS
By GREGORY KANE | March 26, 2008
On Monday, the House of Delegates passed a bill that would establish a Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment. The commission, which will have 19 members, is to issue a report by Dec. 15 of this year on at least seven recommendations. Guess what's at the top of the list of recommendations? You'd be right if you guessed "racial disparities," and you'd have guessed that even if you had just beamed in from Planet Dimwit. No. 2 on the list is "jurisdictional disparities." No. 3 is "socio-economic disparities," while "the risk of innocent people being executed" comes in at numero quatro.
NEWS
By Tyeesha Dixon | January 23, 2008
Saying that he poses too great a danger to society, prosecutors argued yesterday that convicted killer Brandon T. Morris deserves a death sentence for killing a correctional officer. Washington County Deputy State's Attorney Joseph Michael sought to establish Morris' "future dangerousness" during the opening of sentencing hearings in Howard County Circuit Court. Defense attorney Arcangelo Tuminelli started the proceedings by saying Morris chose to be sentenced by Judge Joseph P. Manck rather than by the jury that convicted him Friday of first-degree murder and other counts in the January 2006 killing of Jeffery A. Wroten in Washington County.
NEWS
By Tyeesha Dixon | January 12, 2008
Too little evidence exists to prove that a prison inmate charged with murdering a corrections officer at a Western Maryland hospital in 2006 planned to kill the man, his lawyer told a jury yesterday. However, prosecutors said a witness will testify that Brandon T. Morris crouched over the officer, said, "I'm going to kill you," and shot the man in the face with the officer's state-issued revolver. Whether Morris intended to kill Officer Jeffery A. Wroten emerged as a key issue in the trial, which began yesterday in a Howard County courtroom.
NEWS
By Arin Gencer | August 28, 2007
A Westminster man was sentenced yesterday to life in prison plus 30 years, with the possibility of parole, in a Carroll County Circuit Court case involving first-degree felony murder and attempted second-degree murder in a December 2005 double shooting that resulted in Carroll County's only homicide in two years. Shawn Anthony Jones, 29, was convicted of 11 counts in May, including first-degree felony murder, attempted second-degree murder, attempted armed robbery and first- and second-degree assault.
NEWS
By GREGORY KANE | December 3, 2005
So another Maryland death row inmate is scheduled to take the lethal injection needle. And, again, anti-death penalty activists have yanked out their ever-handy race card. Wesley Baker killed Jane Tyson in 1991 on the parking lot of Westview Mall in Catonsville. Not even the presence of Tyson's two grandchildren deterred Baker. He was sentenced to death for the crime, and his death warrant says he should be executed sometime next week. Baker is black. His victim was white. Death penalty opponents point to that to support their claim that Maryland's death penalty is racist.
NEWS
BY A SUN STAFF WRITER | September 9, 2003
Convictions of first-degree murder were overturned yesterday by Maryland's second-highest court for a man sentenced to life in prison without parole in the 1999 killings of five women in a Northeast Baltimore rowhouse, but he will not be going free. In a 36-page decision filed yesterday, the Court of Special Appeals ruled that Baltimore Circuit Judge Joseph P. McCurdy Jr. had failed to give the jury the option of convicting Tariq A. Malik, then 22, of the 1400 block of Kossuth St. of second-degree murder, given evidence at his trial in 2001.
NEWS
By Stephanie Hanes | December 19, 2002
Maryland's highest court ordered a new hearing yesterday in the case of a Baltimore County man convicted of felony murder, saying two black residents might have unlawfully been kept from sitting on the jury that convicted him. In what the defense attorney for Jerome M. Edmonds called an unusual move, the Maryland Court of Appeals said Baltimore County Circuit Judge J. Norris Byrnes must revisit whether prosecutors excluded two potential jurors because they...
NEWS
May 26, 2002
Up for debate: Which murder is most heinous? Gregory Kane's column "Homicide data should give death penalty foes pause" (May 22) seeks to justify the racial disparity on Maryland's death row with statistics that show that blacks on death row are not out of proportion to their numbers as offenders in felony murder cases and that whites are more often the victims of felony homicides. Mr. Kane's premise is that these statistics are relevant because felony murder is the most likely way to be death-penalty eligible in Maryland, and perpetrators of felony murder are considered the "most vicious and dangerous."
NEWS
By Gregory Kane | May 22, 2002
REMEMBER, when reading these statistics, that it was the death penalty opponents who brought up the subject of race. They're the ones who contend that blacks on Maryland's death row are there in "disproportionate" numbers. The statistics are from a Bureau of Justice study, "Homicide Trends in the U.S.," from 1976 to 1999. Part of the study lists "homicide trends by race," which for our purposes are most revealing. First, a caveat: Statistics can prove almost anything the person using them wants to prove.
NEWS
By Laura Barnhardt | February 8, 2002
Two Glen Burnie men were found guilty of first-degree felony murder yesterday in the October 2000 shooting of a teen-ager in Pasadena. An Anne Arundel County Circuit Court jury deliberated for nearly 12 hours over two days before finding Gerald Carvell Wallace, 24, and Keith Lamont Mallet, 21, guilty in the shooting death of Jerome Isaiah Johnson, 18, of Columbia during an attempted robbery in Pasadena's Freetown neighborhood. Assistant State's Attorney Kathleen E. Rogers said jurors were convinced by physical evidence that corroborated everything the prosecution's witness, George Scott, 24, of Annapolis, said during the trial.