Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s goal of overturning the state’s death penalty achieved a difficult stride today when the state senate voted in favor of a repeal. The vote was 27 to 20 in favor of getting rid of capital punishment, The Washington Post reports.

With the Senate vote out of the way, O’Malley’s push now just needs to pass the House of Delegates, where the repeal bill already has 67 cosponsors and is expected to sail through with little opposition. In the Senate, keeping the death penalty was favored by most Republican and many Democratic members, including Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller. But Miller assured O’Malley that despite his personal opposition toward ending capital punishment, the Senate would still take a vote on the measure. Miller was one of 10 Democrats who voted to keep the death penalty.

Maryland last executed a convict in 2005, and currently has five inmates on death row. O’Malley previously pushed to end the death penalty in 2009, but that effort was stopped short in favor of reforms to capital punishment, which has been on the books in Maryland since its colonial founding in 1689.

O’Malley and the NAACP announced this new effort in January. The governor, along with several other advocates, including Archbishop William E. Lori of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, testified in support of repealing the death penalty last month.

The bill being moved through the Maryland General Assembly now would replace execution with life in prison without the possibility of parole as the most severe criminal penalty. But, the Post reports, it would not apply to the five death row inmates, though O’Malley could elect to commute their sentences.