Maryland: No Death Penalty for Anonymous Commenters

The Washington Post reports that the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee rejected Gov. Martin O'Malley's bill to repeal the death penalty, the latest turn in the state's long back-and-forth history on capital punishment. It's hardly the last. In fact, it's not even the last legislative push Maryland will see before spring.

The Senate committee split on O'Malley's repeal bill, by a vote of 5 to 5. Sen. Nancy Jacobs (R-Harford), a death penalty supporter, would have killed the bill, had she showed up for the vote. But a tie is enough to warrant a legislative action an "unfavorable" status. Nevertheless, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert)—another death penalty supporter—granted the bill clemency. Exercising a rare procedural rule, TVMMJ will allow the bill to move on to full Senate debate.

It kind of seems that Maryland death penalty supporters are just not that into the death penalty. The state has waffled on it in the past, nearly enacting a moratorium in 2001, actually enacting a moratorium in 2002, lifting the moratorium in 2003, executing a man in 2004, introducing repeal legislation in 2005, seeing a court-ordered moratorium in 2006, failing to pass repeal legislation in 2007, and establishing procedures to reinstate the death penalty in 2008.

In truth, Maryland is not even all that good at doing the death penalty. There are nine people sitting on death row today. Three men who might have faced lethal injection were exonerated during the 1990s. That is an enormous fail rate! Meanwhile, as the state can't quite decide whether to kill these men or not, the Supreme Court is preparing to consider a case that should decide whether prisoners have a constitutional right to the kinds of DNA evidence that exonerated Anthony Gray, Keith Longtin, and Kirk Bloodsworth in Maryland.

John Aloysius Farrell, writing for the for the U.S. News & World Report's blog, posts a stern warning to Maryland, a tale about an innocent man who only narrowly avoided prosecution for a crime that a near lookalike had committed. Pretty sure he's cribbing from Les Misérables here, but in any case, it sounds like the sort of crime that will land you on death row in Maryland, where state legislators generally speaking smile more kindly on your fate on odd-numbered years.

In other news of aborted justice in the Old Line State, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that there is a constitutional right—albeit a qualified right—to anonymous speech on the Internet. May God have mercy on your unattributed screeds.

Photo used with permission under a Creative Commons license with Flickr user Willem van Bergen