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As he prepares to leave office, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley has commuted the sentences of the state’s four remaining death row inmates.

Maryland’s General Assembly voted to abolish the death penalty in 2013, which O’Malley notes in a statement “was not challenged in referendum.”

“Recent appeals and the latest opinion on this matter by Maryland’s Attorney General have called into question the legality of carrying out earlier death sentences,” O’Malley said in a statement. “I have now met or spoken with many of the survivors of the victims of these brutal murders. They are all good and decent people who have generously granted me the courtesy of discussing the cases of their individual family members. I am deeply grateful and appreciative of their willingness to speak with me.”

O’Malley said he had to decide if the “public good is served by allowing these essentially un-executable sentences to stand.” His decision: It does not.

“In the final analysis, there is one truth that stands between and before all of us. That truth is this — few of us would ever wish for our children or grandchildren to kill another human being or to take part in the killing of another human being,” he said. “The legislature has expressed this truth by abolishing the death penalty in Maryland.”

The four inmates — Vernon Evans, Anthony Grandison, Jody Lee Miles and Heath Burch — will all serve life in prison without the possibility of parole. From the Baltimore-Sun:

Evans and Grandison were convicted in a 1983 contract slaying at a Baltimore County motel. Miles was found guilty of the 1997 murder of a man during a robbery in Salisbury. Burch was sentenced to die in 1996 for killing an elderly couple when he broke into their home in Capitol Heights.

“It is my hope that these commutations might bring about a greater degree of closure for all of the survivors and their families,” O’Malley said.