When Maryland’s death penalty commission issues its inevitable conclusion that capital punishment should be abolished in this state, maybe some astute citizen will ask why legislators bothered to waste taxpayer money to even go through the motions.
Such commissions — the hearings for Maryland’s ended this week — are NOT formed with the intent that its members come back with a ringing endorsement of capital punishment. They’re formed to do precisely the opposite. But in order to make it look like the fix wasn’t already in, commission members have to go through the motions.
Witness after witness was trotted out, rehashing all the old and by this time tired arguments against the death penalty: It’s not a deterrent; it’s too expensive; it’s not fair (as if felony murder is); and — this one’s my absolute favorite — we may execute someone who’s innocent.
Now you can bet none of these bleeding hearts bothered to check whether any of the men executed in Maryland since 1994 — John Thanos, Flint Gregory Hunt, Tyrone Gilliam, Stephen Gilliam and Wesley Baker — were, in fact, innocent. Instead they trot out Kirk Bloodsworth, who was sentenced to death and later exonerated, as proof that we might execute an innocent man.
But Bloodsworth’s case proves that the safeguards against executing an innocent man are in place and, apparently, working. Bloodsworth was the beneficiary of those safeguards and, so were Thanos, Hunt, Gilliam, Oken and Baker, their ending up taking the “Thanos cocktail” notwithstanding.
Every bit as innocent as Bloodsworth were Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell, two New York City men who died in a torrent of cop bullets in what have been called “accidental shootings.” Alberta Spruill, a 57-year-old resident of the Big Apple, died from a heart attack after police tossed a concussion grenade into her apartment in an attempt to arrest a drug dealer they already had in custody.
Those are three innocent people who have definitely been killed by agents of the state in this country. If we were to use the logic death penalty opponents use — that capital punishment should be abolished because we MIGHT execute someone innocent — let’s take the thinking to its logical conclusion: Shouldn’t we abolish police forces, or at least outlaw police using guns or any other kinds of weapons?
We’d have to, otherwise we’d be saying that the Diallos and Bells and Spruills among us have to just take their chances while convicted felony murderers — EVEN THE ONES WHO ARE GUILTY — shouldn’t have to take theirs.
That doesn’t seem quite fair to me, and we all know how death penalty opponents feel about fairness. And since they are so big on fairness, how about this possibility: Suppose some prison gangbanger or just a regular homicidal inmate fatally shanks one of their precious innocents while he’s serving one of those life-without-parole sentences the bleeding hearts cherish? Are they saying they can live with THAT scenario, but not with a state-sponsored execution?
Well, they probably could, although you could argue the innocent’s blood would still be on their hands. A life-without-parole sentence certainly wouldn’t help an innocent in that circumstance, would it? And a life-without-parole sentence for the guilty — you know, one of those death row inmates who are on death row not for their first murder, but for their second or third — is nothing more than a kill-in-prison-and-get-out-of-punishment-free card.
The victim may be another inmate or, as in the cases of David McGuinn and Jeffery Wroten, corrections officers. Two men have been accused of fatally stabbing McGuinn. Neither was serving life without parole, but they were serving life sentences with so much time added that they might as well have been serving life without parole.
If the death penalty is abolished in Maryland and these two men are found guilty, what then becomes their punishment for killing McGuinn? One that they, in essence, already had?
Of all the witnesses trotted out before the commission, you’d have thought someone would have had the common decency to ask a member of McGuinn’s family or the woman who was his fiancee at the time he was killed to testify so they’d have a chance to ask that very question.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Maryland and Baltimore for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
