Since Shaun is out for a while, I’ma steal his schtick.
Maryland is set to abolish its death penalty.
Maryland is set to become the 18th state in the nation to ban the death penalty. A week after the state Senate approved legislation repealing capital punishment and replacing it with life in prison without parole, the House of Delegates passed the bill Friday by a vote of 82-56.
The news serves as a victory for Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley, who has been trying to repeal the state’s death penalty for years. He urged the passage of a bill to abolish the death penalty back in 2009, but the measure ultimately failed.
“Evidence shows that the death penalty is not a deterrent, it cannot be administered without racial bias, and it costs three times as much as life in prison without parole. What’s more, there is no way to reverse a mistake if an innocent person is put to death,” O’Malley said in a statement Friday.
Maryland becomes the sixth state in six years to put an end to the death penalty, after New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Illinois, and Connecticut.
Washington should make it 7.
Conservatives should be the biggest opponents of the death penalty. How can you be pro life and not trust the government, but at the same time trust the government not to make a mistake and want them to kill someone? I understand anger and revenge but its supposed to be the justice system not the revenge system. Further it costs more to kill someone than to lock them up for life, which goes along with government saving money.
It would certainly be easier for the death penalty to be eliminated and mandatory life in prison be the penalty for murder. No more years and years of appeals, legal costs, and just plain hassle. Murder someone, you get life, no questions asked, just a life sentence, and you don’t get out of prison until you die.
I think it would even be cheaper in the long run.
I think the death penalty is used too frequently and sometimes carelessly (usually by the same state; see e.g. Texas), but I’d like to keep it on the books while making it hard to use, because some crimes are so heinous that life in prison isn’t enough. For example, if the Sandy Hook shooter had survived, why should he get to spend life in prison?
@2 For run-of-the-mill murders, yes. But what would you do with a monster?
The murder for which Ted Bundy was executed was a 12-year-old girl he kidnapped from a junior high, raped and tortured, killed by slashing her throat with a hunting knife, then dumped her body in a hog pen.
Years ago, I read an article about a warden who presided over several executions. He initially opposed the death penalty and found the task distasteful, but in the end decided some people deserve to die. He described the execution of a serial killer as like “putting down a rabid dog.”
Like I said above, make it very very hard to put someone to death, but keep that option on the books for the true monsters among us.
I would be proud if Washington became the 7th state to abolish the death penalty. How do we make it happen?
I think a life sentence without parole in the current prison structure is real punishment.
How about this. Keep the death penalty on the books. Anybody who gets the death penalty goes to death row to rot until they die.
No execution by lethal injection or rope or bullet. Just sitting there and rotting.
From 4,
Yes, that sounds reasonable. I could easily support that.
@2 It’s not so much a matter of someone “deserving to die” as it is that someone comes along every generation or so who’s so dangerously, deviously, wantonly evil that there’s no way the rest of us can consider ourselves safe as long as he/she draws breath. Theodore Bundy was quite definitely one of those people. Dick Cheney might end up being viewed by future historians in the same way.
And no, I’m not kidding…and if that offends your little partisan sensibilities, tough.