The Dying Death Penalty in Maryland

The death penalty, in Maryland and elsewhere, is dying. Its death rattle is audible in court rooms and state houses around the nation. And well it should, because it just doesn’t work the way it’s applied. So maybe the time has arrived to end all the delaying and posturing by doing away with capital punishment once and for all. Governor O’Malley, a death penalty opponent, tried and failed but settled for a compromise. And here we are again, hung up on the protocols of taking a life by lethal injection.

The death penalty in America is an elaborate game of angles and loopholes that anybody on death row can play with the help of a willing attorney who’ll file a lifetime of appeals that have little or no relationship to the condemned person’s transgression. And all the while it costs $50,000 a year to house a prisoner. There are currently five inmates on death row in Maryland

The death penalty in Maryland has, in effect, been suspended for three years in a dispute over the manner in which the punishment is applied. And the moratorium was recently extended by indirection when a review panel of legislators found “serious flaws” in the new regulations that were proposed by the O’Malley administration. The committee attempted to subpoena all 24 state’s attorneys to testify because of differences over how the death penalty is applied in the various counties. The subpoenas were dropped.

Read the rest: The Slow Death of Capital Punishment | Politics & Media | SPLICETODAY.COM

Technorati Tags: death penalty, death row, death sentence, capital punishment, moratorium, maryland, crime, law, prison, inmate