How can state leaders still cling to death penalty?



Dan Rodricks

February 22, 2009

The death penalty in the hands of politicians: Few things seem as 
twisted and as troubling as the matter of state-sponsored executions 
authorized by men and women with large nameplates pinned to their 
lapels. While in the ideal they might be devoted to public service 
and to representative democracy, what most of them seek, first and 
foremost, is name recognition and re-election. And in a nation as 
violent as ours, re-election has required being tough on crime, and 
being tough on crime has required support of capital punishment.

That has been the instruction in American politics for a generation; 
even alleged liberals Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton supported the 
death penalty. When he was running for president in 1992, Mr. Clinton 
stepped away from his campaign long enough to return to Arkansas to 
oversee the execution of a brain-damaged killer named Ricky Ray 
Rector. Grandstanders - Democrat and Republican, senators and state's 
attorneys - have used the death penalty to earn tough-on-crime bona 
fides. The death penalty has served the political class at great 
expense to the greater society; it has sapped resources that could 
have been better spent for public safety.

People are hip to this now, and the grandstanders are becoming more 
apparent and isolated. In Maryland, a Gonzales poll in January found 
that public support of the death penalty had fallen by nearly 10 
percentage points in eight years, and 65 percent of us now believe 
life in prison without parole is an acceptable alternative.

National surveys reveal that growing numbers of Americans see the 
problems of an entire system: a failed war on drugs, the highest per 
capita rate of incarceration in the world, prisons with revolving 
doors, and, at last count by the Death Penalty Information Center in 
Washington, 130 innocent men placed on death row in 26 states over 
the last 36 years.

This broken system has been kept in place by entrenched politicians, 
such as those who run the Maryland General Assembly.

Now Gov. Martin O'Malley, who has been in office but two years, comes 
to the state Senate to demand repeal of the death penalty, armed with 
a report that should settle the issue. The report, from the 
commission headed by former U.S. Attorney General Benjamin R. 
Civiletti, is based on what appears to be an objective assessment of 
capital punishment here over the last 30 years. It bristles with 
information, analysis, logic and integrity - imagine that! - and it 
makes the following conclusions:

•Disparities exist when the race of the defendant and the race of the 
victim are taken into account; killers of white victims are 2 1/2 
times more likely to face the death penalty than killers of African-
Americans.

•With so much prosecutorial discretion, county by county, capital 
cases are vulnerable to jurisdictional disparities beyond reform: 
"The fact that similar capital offenses perpetrated by similar 
offenders are treated so differently depending on where the crimes 
are committed renders the administration of capital punishment 
irretrievably inconsistent, nonuniform and therefore unfair in 
Maryland."

•The death penalty has been a waste of money. Sixty-two of 77 death 
sentences have been reversed. Add to the costs of those cases and 
their post-conviction appeals the cost of keeping inmates on death 
row, estimated at $68,000 annually. "There are other areas in the 
Maryland criminal justice system where such resources could be 
applied and significant results could be expected."

State senators who remain supporters of the death penalty, starting 
with their way-too-long-time president, Thomas V. Mike "If it's 
lethal injection, I'll insert the needle" Miller, need to be asked if 
they've read this report - and, if so, how, in good conscience, they 
can maintain the status quo in the face of it. Certainly, at this 
point, there is only the pathetic political consideration, the idea 
that, by voting for repeal, they would become vulnerable in re-election.

Those who cling to the death penalty in Maryland need to be held 
accountable. Clinging to the death penalty means clinging to a biased 
and unfair system that saps the state and local budgets of money that 
could be better spent to protect the public, and it means assigning 
to all of us the still-real risk of someday executing the wrong man.

Dan Rodricks' column appears Sundays on this page and Tuesdays in the 
news pages. He is host of the midday talk show on WYPR-FM.