I oppose the death penalty and will sponsor legislation to abolish it in the State of Maryland. If I had been in the State Senate this session, I would have joined Senators Gladden, Pinsky, and Grosfeld, to sponsor SB 349, the bill to repeal capital punishment in our state. Our incumbent did not sponsor this bill.

The death penalty in Maryland lands not on the people who did the worst crimes but the people who had the worst lawyers. Moreover, it is a lottery infected with racial and geographic bias. The University of Maryland study commissioned by the state and performed by Professor Raymond Paternoster showed that “killers of whites are six times more likely to be sentenced to death than killers of non-whites.” Specifically, “blacks who kill whites are two and one-half times more likely to be sentenced to death than are whites who kill whites, three and one-half times more likely than are blacks who kill blacks, and almost eleven times more likely to be sentenced to death than ‘other’ racial combinations.” Professor Raymond Paternoster, University of Maryland, “An Empirical Analysis of Maryland’s Death Sentencing System With Respect to the Influence of Race and Legal Jurisdiction,” pp. 30-31.

If the death penalty were an effective deterrent, the safest states in the country would be Texas and Florida, and Vermont and Minnesota would be among the most dangerous. In fact, the death penalty just sends everyone the wrong message and cheapens life and sensibility in the killing jurisdiction. There has been great progress on this question as the public encounters the grisly news based on DNA evidence that state governments have certainly put innocent people to death.

I will be a leader who stands up for both safe communities and an end to the irrational and obsolete practice of state-sponsored executions.