Local capital punishment foes are hoping to see Maryland’s legislature follow the example set by New Jersey’s this week and strike down the death penalty.
Key state lawmakers, however, are less optimistic.
“I’m not sure the New Jersey decision will have an impact in the Maryland Senate,” said Sen. Brian Frosh, D-Montgomery County. “And [Maryland legislators] are more likely to have an impact on the Senate action than New Jersey is.”
Frosh chairs the Senate’s 11-member Judicial Proceedings Committee, in which a bill to repeal Maryland’s law died last year in a narrow defeat, keeping it from a vote in the General Assembly. This year, the committee’s makeup is unchanged.
“Somebody needs to change a vote in order for the bill to pass out of committee,” Frosh said. “And the death penalty is generally something people understand very well, have made up their minds about and rarely switch.”
Sen. Paul Pinsky, D-Prince George’s, co-sponsored last year’s bill and calls New Jersey’smove “enlightened thinking.”
“I can’t help but believe that as the survey of the public around the country has started to shift,” Pinsky said, “hopefully a legislative change of heart will also track that.”
With the ink from New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine’s pen still fresh on the bill to repeal his state’s law, groups opposed to capital punishment are undeterred.
“Maryland is ready to do it,” said Jane Henderson, executive director of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions.
“Our polling is even better than New Jersey’s,” she said, citing a survey that indicated 61 percent of Maryland voters believe that life without parole is an acceptable substitute for the death penalty.
“The argument that we can’t get the committee is one I can’t accept,” she said. “It’s more a question of when than a question of if.”
Regardless of what happens in the legislature, Maryland’s five remaining death row inmates are living under a 2002 moratorium placed on capital punishment by Gov. Parris Glendening.
To have a death penalty law in name only skews data on the efficacy of capital punishment, said Michael Parazino, a Bethesda-based advocate forthe death penalty. “If we’re going to have that, we might as well have a real repeal. To have a phony one is worse than not having one at all,” he said.
