The Maryland General Assembly will consider a bill to allow the most evil, violent, vicious members of society to kill innocent people without fear of punishment. This bill will make it legal for someone on trial for murder to kill the witnesses against them without punishment. This bill will allow a gang who viciously rapes and tortures a woman to then kill her without fear of further punishment. This bill will reward the prisoner serving a life sentence — who kills a guard or other prisoner — with repeated trips out of the prison to see his family and friends during court hearings.
What legislation would bring about such absurd results? The bill to repeal the death penalty in Maryland.
The governor and legislature laid the groundwork to escape responsibility for these injustices by pushing their constitutional duties off to a biased death penalty commission to study.
First, the commission accepted a flawed and inaccurate study of the cost of the death penalty which concluded it costs too much. Using the committee’s cost-benefit analysis, what should we do with a prisoner serving a life-equivalent sentence when he kills a guard or escapes and kills someone else? Nothing. Why should we waste money on an investigation and trial when the killer will be returned to the same cell to continue to serve the sentence he was already serving? It would be much cheaper to let the prison administration take away the murderer’s television privileges as an added penalty for a second or subsequent murder.
Those who advocate the repeal of the death penalty are aware these injustices will result, but they have two responses. The first, a huge lie, is that there is the sentence of life in prison without parole. They know the addition of these two words to a life sentence will change nothing, but they hope to fool the voters, the jurors and the legislature. The only people they won’t fool are the murderers who see this as an empty threat.
The second response is that the government should not take a life. Every society expects the death of some of its members as necessary to the continued existence of the society. Even societies who oppose war and capital punishment expect certain members to die in order to preserve certain values and principles of the society.
Imagine your child is ill from a high fever. In the hospital emergency room, none of the doctors or nurses will see the child because they do not want to be exposed to or risk exposing their own children to a serious illness. You helplessly watch your child die.
Our society expects someone to be willing to come forward and risk his or her life and the lives of others in order to prevent epidemics and research deadly viruses.
Imagine a fire in a city where the firefighters refuse to attack the flames because it is too dangerous and one of them might die. Imagine a society where no one will act to disarm a bomb, rescue hostages, arrest a dangerous criminal, stop a man from beating his wife or child, or guard prisoners because it is too dangerous and someone might die. Imagine a world where no one will stop a tyrant from marching millions of people to death camps, bombing cities and enslaving populations.
Thankfully, we do not have to imagine these things because our society expects, in fact demands, that the brightest, the most courageous and even the ordinary citizen can be called upon by their country, state and community to die in order to protect our values and our system of life.
If a society can require this ultimate sacrifice by the average citizen, then what is the issue with requiring the same sacrifice by the vilest, most violent, most evil members of the society to preserve order and the ideals of justice and as fair retribution and punishment for the crimes they have committed — and to prevent them from taking other lives? An opponent of capital punishment would have no qualms about demanding the sacrifice of the life of another to rescue the opponent of capital punishment from peril.
Of course once the opponents of the death penalty do away with capital punishment, they will point to the inequities in sentences as a reason to repeal life sentences.
Joseph I. Cassilly is the state’s attorney for Harford County. Reach him at [email protected].
