The Maryland General Assembly has voted to repeal the state's death penalty. The bill now goes to Gov. Martin O'Malley, who has long pushed for such a ban and will surely sign it.
The bill did not come out of nowhere. There have been previous attempts at repeal, the creation of a commission to study this issue - the panel came out recommending a ban - and moves to tighten the requirements for imposing a death sentence.
Now, they're doing away with it. Maryland thus becomes the 18th state in the nation and the sixth in the past few years to end the death penalty. (Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York are the other five.)
Even so, the United States remains the only advanced Western democracy that fails to recognize capital punishment for the race- and class-based violation of human rights which it is. Look at the map.Countries in blue - there are a hundred of them - have abolished the death penalty. Those in the ugly greenish color impose it only under exceptional circumstances, such as crimes committed in wartime. Those in gold have abolished it in practice: It may still be on the books, but they haven't executed anyone for at least 10 years.
And then there are those, such as us, in the reddish-brown. I want you to look at that map and notice the other countries we are aligning ourselves with on this.
We should be ashamed.
However, to end on an up note, the fact is, the death penalty is fading away in most of the US: The Death Penalty Information Center said death sentences in the US have declined by 75% and executions by 60% since the 1990s.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/maryland-death-penalty_n_2885162.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20130315/us-death-penalty-maryland/
http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2013/02/executions-are-becoming-rare-in-us.html
http://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment/death-penalty-101
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_capital_punishment_by_country
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