Maryland to Outlaw Death Penalty

Fuzzy_

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Maryland House of Delegates votes to repeal death penalty - baltimoresun.com

Maryland's General Assembly voted to repeal the capital punishment last Friday. The State has a 375-year history of the death penalty.

The House of Delegates approved Gov. O'Malley's repeal of the legislation with a vote of 82-56. The Governor is sure to sign the bill.

More from the article:
"We're a better state for ending it," said Del. Sandy Rosenberg, a Democrat from Baltimore who has long pushed for repeal . . . Delegates spoke of religion, morality and personal loss, as well as grisly murders from Maryland's recent past, in variously trying to persuade colleagues to erase capital punishment from the books or keep it for the most heinous crimes . . . "The death penalty is not a deterrent. It is justice," said Del. C.T. Wilson, a former prosecutor and a Charles County Democrat. "I've seen the worst of the worst. It is necessary."​
An increasing number of States are outlawing the death penalty. Do you see this as a good thing? Is the death penalty an effective crime deterrent?
 

Eric_8

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Maryland House of Delegates votes to repeal death penalty - baltimoresun.com

Maryland's General Assembly voted to repeal the capital punishment last Friday. The State has a 375-year history of the death penalty.

The House of Delegates approved Gov. O'Malley's repeal of the legislation with a vote of 82-56. The Governor is sure to sign the bill.

More from the article:
"We're a better state for ending it," said Del. Sandy Rosenberg, a Democrat from Baltimore who has long pushed for repeal . . . Delegates spoke of religion, morality and personal loss, as well as grisly murders from Maryland's recent past, in variously trying to persuade colleagues to erase capital punishment from the books or keep it for the most heinous crimes . . . "The death penalty is not a deterrent. It is justice," said Del. C.T. Wilson, a former prosecutor and a Charles County Democrat. "I've seen the worst of the worst. It is necessary."​
An increasing number of States are outlawing the death penalty. Do you see this as a good thing? Is the death penalty an effective crime deterrent?

Sadly, I see the "penalty" as more useless than anything else at this point. So, I guess I see it as neither a good or bad thing. With the system as it is, I would say that the death penalty is, at best, a minimal deterrent. If only there was somebody out there with ideas to improve the death penalty, I might feel differently about its abolishment.
 

Phil Ayesho

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Its a bad thing.
First, there is no way to ensure that the accused is actually guilty... innocent people ARE put to death because political careers are made by convicting high profile murder cases.

Second, to try and ensure that innocents are less likely to be put to death, or that the justice system was not subverted, we allow the condemned exhaustive access to appeal. This costs the government literally hundreds of millions of dollars in each state that has the death penalty. It is quite literally a fraction of that cost to house, feed and clothe these inmates for the rest of their lives

Third. If it is morally reprehensible for the individual to kill in cold blood... to kill someone who is helpless and who poses no actual threat.... then it is morally reprehensible to empower the State to do the same thing. If someone shoots at a cop, everyone agrees that the Cop has the right to kill the shooter to protect his own and other's lives. But if the Cop arrests the guy, handcuffs him, Locks him in the car, and THEN shoots the guy in the head... everyone agrees that, at that point, the offender posed no threat and the Cops actions would be criminal.
Murder is the ONLY Crime we punish by empowering the State to commit the exact same crime.

Fourth.
Locking a man in a concrete box for life effectively protects the public, ergo there is no public safety argument for execution. ( just for life with no parole )
Thus, the only purpose for State execution is Retribution.

And, while we all agree that crime should result in consequences that deter that crime... do you really want to empower the State to engage in Lethal Vengenace?

You can not ethically take the stand that killing except in self defense is wrong and allow the State to kill people strapped to a table or chair.
If killing is wrong, then the State should be held to that same standard and not allowed to kill except in cases of imminent and ongoing threat to life.

The State should embody the Rationale underlying the law.
If we think killing helpless people is wrong, then it is just as wrong for the State as it is for the citizen. Wrong to kill people who are at your mercy, wrong to engage in retribution.
 

ColoradoGuy

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^ I think these are all pretty good points.

The strongest case against capital punishment -- in my opinion -- comes from the exonerations that have been widely publicized in recent years. The Innocence Project has directly been involved in the reversal of convictions for 170 wrongfully-convicted individuals simply by using DNA testing. Out of those 170, eighteen individuals were on death-row for crimes they didn't commit.

As long as there are coerced confessions, recanted eye-witness testimony and/or erroneous (or missing) forensic analysis, the State will always be at risk for executing innocents. If you remove all of the other moral arguments that Phil Ayesho offered, surely the idea of killing an innocent person should be enough for anyone be against capital punishment.
 

KTF40

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No idea whether it's an effective crime deterrent but I'm against the death penalty so I applaud Maryland for taking this step.
 

Who_Dun_It

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In the situations of it being an exceptionally heinous crime and especially if they're caught (Dahlmer, Gacy, Son of Sam, ect), please off them so we're not paying to keep them alive. Big problem we've had here in Illinois is that way to many people in both red and blue portions of the state have received long term jail or death penaltys even though they didn't do it and could even proved that they couldn't have done what they were convicted of if they had a better lawyer.......and investigating officers that didn't have tunnel vision or were just flat out too incompetent or lazy to do the investigation right.
 

Tactfulgal

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I don't see how we can allow ourselves to have the death penalty when we know innocent people are occasionally convicted and later exonerated.
 

mallak

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In the situations of it being an exceptionally heinous crime and especially if they're caught (Dahlmer, Gacy, Son of Sam, ect), please off them so we're not paying to keep them alive. Big problem we've had here in Illinois is that way to many people in both red and blue portions of the state have received long term jail or death penaltys even though they didn't do it and could even proved that they couldn't have done what they were convicted of if they had a better lawyer.......and investigating officers that didn't have tunnel vision or were just flat out too incompetent or lazy to do the investigation right.

I'm not a lawyer but I don't think you can effectively ban the death penalty if you still allow it for exceptional circumstances, it has to be all or nothing.
 

ColoradoGuy

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In the situations of it being an exceptionally heinous crime and especially if they're caught (Dahlmer, Gacy, Son of Sam, ect), please off them so we're not paying to keep them alive...

I think what you've proposed is exactly what's wrong with the concept of 'capital punishment': it is too subjective. Who dies and who doesn't depends often on representation and variable circumstances. The only way to address subjectivity is to take the death penalty off the table across the board.

The cost of "paying to keep them alive" isn't as dramatic as the cost of putting them to death. This has been studied several times and was reported on NBC in 2009.
 
D

deleted15807

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Why don't we ask the victims what they think about the death penalty. Oh wait!!! THEY ARE DEAD!!!!

No you oh wait. When the dead can rise and tell us who killed them we shall refrain from sentencing people to death we are not 100% did the crime.
 

cdarro

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So glad we did away with this years ago in Canada. It was officially abolished in 1976, but no one had been executed since 1962. It was actually the sentencing to death of a teenage boy (Steven Truscott, google it, it's a hell of a story) that finally spurred the federal cabinet to commute all death sentences and eventually led to complete abolition.