FEATURED JOBS
Comments (2)As leaders of a regional rabbinic association and a statewide civil rights organization, we represent two distinct communities — Jews and African-Americans — with strong histories of working together to end injustice.
We share profound objections to Maryland’s continued use of the death penalty and call upon our communities to engage in the opportunity to end it in the 2012 legislative session.
While the Hebrew Bible supports, and even mandates, capital punishment for murderers, Jewish tradition for the past 1,700 years has strongly and unequivocally opposed it. The death penalty conflicts with overriding values concerning the sanctity of human life, compassion and the very real difficulty of discerning the truth.
Changes made to Maryland law in 2009 failed to address the disparate impact of the factor of race in death penalty decisions. Since the death penalty was reinstated in Maryland in 1978, five men have been executed and five more currently sit on death row. In all 10 cases, the victims were white, although 75 percent of murder victims in Maryland are African-American. Such disparities can no longer be tolerated.
Since 1973, 140 innocent people in the United States have been exonerated and released from death row. DNA evidence played a substantial role in only 17 of the 140 cases. In others, coerced confessions, false witnesses, mishandled physical evidence and questionable testimony abounded, compromising truth and justice. A 2009 Maryland law requires more stringent rules of evidence for capital cases, but the possibility for error remains. The only safeguard is no executions.
The death penalty is irreversible; therefore our judicial system requires an exhaustive review process that, in our state, can result in many years of new appeals, trials and re-sentencing. Indeed, three have sat on Maryland’s death row for nearly 30 years. The alternative in Maryland is life in prison without the possibility of parole — a severe punishment that keeps us safe, costs less and allows us room to correct errors.
In abolishing capital punishment, we not only enhance justice dispensed in our state, but we also save money within our criminal justice and prison systems. Those savings can be redirected to support families coping with the aftermath of violent crime.
Both of us, together with the groups we represent, have the deepest sympathy for the families of murder victims. Some may suggest that we can support these families by pushing for more executions to punish murderers. We have come to a different conclusion: The sanctity of life, already violated by a murder, is not enhanced by the death penalty. This is particularly so when justice is meted out unequally, and mistakes that abound in the judicial system could lead to the execution of an innocent person.
We urge all Marylanders, including our state legislators, to carefully consider their views on the death penalty. Does it deliver justice fairly? Several states, including New Jersey, New Mexico and Illinois, have recently concluded that it does not.
Now is the time for the Maryland General Assembly to end capital punishment as well.
Rabbi Amy Scheinerman is chair of the Baltimore Board of Rabbis. Gerald Stansbury is president of the Maryland State Conference of the NAACP.