Maryland lawmakers and the state attorney general are bucking calls to repeal the death penalty with a bill that would expand the types of evidence admissible in capital cases.
Sen. Norman R. Stone Jr., D-Baltimore County, is sponsoring a bill that would enable courts to use fingerprints and photographs to convict suspects of capital murder.
The bill rebuffs the legislature’s highly publicized vote last year to limit admissible evidence in capital cases to “biological” or “DNA” samples, a video recording of the suspect committing the crime or a recording of the suspect’s voluntary confession.
“The state legislature botched the death penalty in Maryland last year by weakening it and this is an attempt to fix a known, blatant flaw in last year’s very bad bill,” said Sen. David Brinkley, R-Carroll County.
But fingerprint evidence is subjective, and “comparing curls and swirls to see if they match” easily could send an innocent man to death row, said Jane Henderson, executive director of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions.
“There is a huge amount of ignorance in Annapolis,” she said. “Does Annapolis have its head buried so deep in the sand to think that fingerprints — just because we’ve used them for 100 years — are reliable?”
Experts on fingerprint analysis are scheduled to testify before the Judicial Proceedings Committee Wednesday.
Sen. J. Lowell Stoltzfus, R-Worcester County, said the fingerprint clause clarifies — rather than diverges from — last year’s decision to tighten evidence standards. He said “biological standards” infers the use of fingerprints.
Stone defended fingerprints as “valuable evidence in every type of crime.”
“[Prosecutors] use fingerprints all the time,” he said.
Gov. Martin O’Malley asked the legislature to repeal Maryland’s death penalty last year, but lawmakers voted down the effort in favor of tightening evidence restrictions. The changes make the death penalty more difficult to prosecute in Maryland than in any of the 35 other states supporting capital punishment, according to Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler.
Maryland has held five executions since it reinstated capital punishment in 1978, and five defendants are currently on death row — each at the cost of $68,000 a year — according to the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment. The last person executed in Maryland was Wesley Eugene Baker in December 2005. Baker was convicted of killing 49-year-old Jane Tyson at Westview Mall in Catonsville.
