The Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment — the official name for Gov. Martin O’Malley’s anti-death penalty death penalty panel — voted last week to end executions in the state.
Why did they waste taxpayers’ time and money with this foolishness?
When a governor who’s against the death penalty appoints a “commission on capital punishment” to “study” capital punishment, we know the deck has been pretty much stacked. Death penalty proponents — you know, we heartless so-and-sos who think executing killers actually prevents them from killing again — said as much when it was formed.
But the commission went through the motions anyway, calling in witnesses, listening to testimony, wasting our money and then concluding exactly what death penalty advocates said they would conclude: That the death penalty should be abolished because we might execute an innocent person.
Mind you, they’ve found no such innocent person in this state yet. There has been no question of the guilt of those who’ve been executed in Maryland during the last 30 years. None of the 13 commission members who voted to end the death penalty has so much as hinted that any of the five persons on Maryland’s death row is innocent. Yet they’re steadfast in their yearning to repeal a law based on what MIGHT happen, no matter how remote the chances.
That steadfastness reveals what’s truly at stake for death penalty opponents: It’s not the chance that an innocent person might be executed. It’s because they’re convinced of their own “moral superiority.”
The phrase in quotes above is not my own. It comes from New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who commissioned a similar panel in his state that came back with precisely the recommendation that Corzine and his fellow anti-death penalty advocates wanted: An end to capital punishment in New Jersey.
Here’s a quote from Corzine after the New Jersey Legislature caved in to his demand and voted to end the death penalty in that state:
“Society must ask — Is it not MORALLY SUPERIOR to imprison 100 people for life than it is to execute all 100 when it is probable we execute an innocent?”
Now that would depend on how many of those 100 go on to kill again, wouldn’t it? If some of them killed a corrections officer or another inmate, or escaped and killed an innocent who was unfortunate enough to cross their path, then how is that “morally superior”?
There are murderers who go on to murder again. Perhaps the most infamous is Kenneth McDuff, the poster boy for death penalty proponents. McDuff was a convicted murderer sentenced to die in Texas but was spared when the Supreme Court’s 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision temporarily put a halt to capital punishment in America.
McDuff was paroled in 1976 after a federal judge ruled that Texas’ prisons were overcrowded. He went on a killing spree but was nabbed again. The state of Texas finally finished the job on McDuff in 1998, when he was strapped in an electric chair and put out of
our collective misery.
For Corzine — and I have to assume Martin O’Malley, the 13 commission members who voted to end capital punishment in Maryland and perhaps hundreds of other death penalty opponents in the state — it was “morally superior” for us to let McDuff run amok on his killing spree rather than let an innocent person be executed by the state.
I can live without that kind of “moral superiority.” I’d prefer the kind of “moral superiority” that doesn’t put the majority of us — and our corrections officers and prison inmates — in harm’s way. I want to put the kibosh on this “moral superiority” addiction — this “jones,” to coin a slang term from an earlier era — before it gets out of hand. Because the “moral superiority” jones of anti-death penalty advocates will NEVER be satisfied.
Once capital punishment is gone, they’ll go after life without parole. Once that’s gone, life WITH parole will be their next target. Then it’ll be any sentence over 30 years, and then any over 20.
Before we know it, the sentence for felony murder will have been haggled down to a wrist slap. All in the name of “moral superiority.”
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Baltimore and Maryland for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
