Maryland Citizens Against State Executions

2010 is an election year in Maryland which means there are lots of opportunities for voicing your opposition to the the death penalty! Your vote counts, so please, whenever the opportunity arises, engage every candidate on the issue of capital punishment and make your voice for repeal heard.

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Attend local candidate forums and ask candidates to tell how, if elected, they will vote on repeal of the death penalty – an issue that will come before the next General Assembly. Contact us if you are attending or want to attend candidate forums to ask about the death penalty: info@mdcase.org or call 301-779-5230.

Hope that you are enjoying a happy and safe summer.

Best regards,
Amy Fusting, Program Director
Maryland Citizens Against State Executions

When the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment urged repeal of the death penalty in 2008, it also made a second, much less publicized recommendation: increase the resources and services for the surviving families of homicide. The Commission clearly listened to the testimony of about a dozen family members of murder victims, including 2005 OSI Baltimore Community Fellow Bonnita Spikes, who now serves as MD CASE’s murder victims’ organizer. Based on her own experience as a survivor, and her ongoing outreach to other murder victims’ family members, particularly in Baltimore, Ms. Spikes emphasized the dire, hereto unmet needs of poor, largely black families for ongoing support and grief counseling services.

Meanwhile, a 2008 study commissioned by the Abell Foundation, reveals that Maryland has expended at least $186 million on its death penalty over the last three decades. A single death sentence in our state costs three times more—or $1.9 million more—than a comparable non-death penalty case, including the costs of long-term incarceration.

Repealing the death penalty would allow a dramatic shift in criminal justice policy priorities. Many victims advocates recognize that homicide survivors are the most invisible and underserved of all crimes victims. This is especially true in our state as homicides occur in the same communities that are disproportionately impacted by poverty, incarceration, and crime. More than 75% of Maryland’s homicide victims are black and half fall in Baltimore City. Meanwhile, Maryland’s death penalty is reserved for white victim murders (all 5 death sentences pending, all 5 executions carried out), and has been disproportionately imposed by Baltimore County.

My audacious idea is that we repeal the death penalty and redirect some of the state tax dollars now spent on death toward comprehensive services that meet the long-term needs of homicide survivors. Such action will not only help long neglected, traumatized families, it can break cycles of violence, where particularly young victims become perpetrators, and make our communities safer.

Key Findings

“The Cost of the Death Penalty in Maryland” was commissioned by The Abell Foundation from researchers at The Urban Institute, a national, nonpartisan economic and social policy research organization. The report analyzed 1,136 Maryland capital murder cases adjudicated between 1978 and 1999 and developed an estimate of how much more was spent on those cases compared to non-death penalty cases. The report covers only cases in which the murder occurred before January 1, 2000.

In the first half of 2008, two more death penalty trials have ended without a death sentence.  Each defendant had opted for judge over jury decisions.  And both cases involved killings committed by men already in prison and so had been highlighted by death penalty proponents to justify continuing the death penalty in Maryland.

These trials continue a trend.  In 2007, two Baltimore County juries opted for LWOP over death in two high profile murder cases.  One of those cases was a second sentencing trial for Jamaal Abeokuto, who had been sentenced to death in 2004.  Abeokuto's had been the only new death sentence handed down in Maryland since 2000.

Compelling new documentary proves powerful organizing tool

Few on either side of the death penalty debate have witnessed the final walk of a condemned prisoner to the death chamber.  Appeals exhausted, there is no hope, save a last minute stay from the governor.  Pastor Carroll Pickett was there for nearly 100 such walks.  In an extraordinary new documentary, At the Death House Door, Pastor Pickett shares his experience - and all it ultimately stirred in him - alongside the stories of some of the men he walked with during his 15 years as chaplain at our nation's busiest death house in Huntsville, TX.

Retention of the death penalty, the Justice has discerned, is likely "the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process that weighs the costs and risks of [that] penalty against its identifiable benefits."

THE BIBLE COMMANDS:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer…
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your father in heaven.” Matthew 5:38-39, 43-45

“Never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:19-21

CHURCH LEADERS TESTIFY:
“How, in the end, does killing its citizens help the state to build the nonviolent, just and civil society that we all desire for ourselves and our children?” Bishop Eugene T. Sutton of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland.

“The United Methodist Church cannot accept retribution or social vengeance as a reason for taking a life. It violates our deepest belief in God as the creator and redeemer of humankind… United Methodists emphatically declare that ‘We oppose capital punishment and urge its elimination from all criminal codes’ (Book of Discipline, Para 164 A).” Bishop Schol, Bishop of the United Methodist Church in the Baltimore-Washington Conference

THE MARYLAND COMMISSION ON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT RECOMMENDS:
Maryland should repeal its death penalty citing the following findings:

• The death penalty adds to the stress and trauma of families of victims.
• Racial and jurisdictional disparities exist here in Maryland.
• There is a real possibility of risk that innocent people might be executed.
• The death penalty is not a deterrent.
• The death penalty costs more than a life sentence without parole.

Dan Rodricks, Baltimore Sun

December 16, 2008
In the report from the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment, the people of this state and their elected representatives have all the evidence needed to abolish the death penalty, once and for all, in the next session of the General Assembly.