Just before the start of 2015, the governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley, decided to commute the death sentences of four death-row inmates, giving them each life sentences without the possibility of parole as an alternative. In March 2013, a bill repealing the death penalty in Maryland was passed by the state legislature and then signed into effect by Mr. O’Malley. The bill simply repealed the death penalty and but not commute any of the death sentences given before the penalty’s abolition.
Mr. O’Malley had been a long-time advocate of repealing the death penalty, so to many, including the Baltimore County state’s attorney, Scott Shellenberger, the move was not unexpected. His actions have, however, caused some violent reactions, both positive and negative. Shellenberger and some of the family members of victims of the criminals on death row have had emotional reactions ranging from disappointment to outrage to despair. Many of those upset justify their opinion that the convicts ought to still have been executed with the legal consistency argument: The death penalty was a viable option for sentence at the time when those prisoners were sentenced, so the punishment ought to be carried out.
It makes sense that different parties are having strong reactions to the governor’s actions. In comparison to other recent decisions and actions taken with regard to the death penalty, O’Malley’s decision is extremely radical and progressive. A recent ruling of the California death penalty as unconstitutional has shocked many legal experts. It is astonishing that it took a court ruling to define the death penalty as unconstitutional; Californians could not even remove it by a referendum vote. But our surprise also shows a more conservative mindset in California; while Californians are still debating over the rectitude of the death penalty itself, Maryland has already moved past a repeal of the penalty and onto determining what to do with residual death row cases.
Additionally, O’Malley’s decision to commute the four inmates’ sentences is more forgiving than President Obama’s commuting of sentences this past year. While the state of Maryland has now commuted four death sentences, Obama this year has only commuted a total of eight sentences, with none of the prisoners on federal death row.
The question of commuting death sentences and the death penalty in general are complex issued in and of themselves. Not only must we consider the ethical implications of allowing for the death penalty, but there are also social factors and trends of injustice to include in our calculations. For example, 95 percent of all inmates currently on death row are poor, and 42 percent of all death row inmates as of October 2014 are black.
However, the question of whether the sentences ought to have been commuted is further complicated in this situation by the fact that the death penalty law had been repealed. From a legal standpoint, there seems to be nothing problematic with carrying out the death penalty sentences. The verdicts were given when the law was in place, and since the law repealing the death penalty did not commute sentences, there is no reason that, legally, the four remaining death row prisoners ought to have faced anything other than death.
However, when viewed through an ethical lens, a decision to carry out the sentences might fall is not as obvious. Presumably one of the reasons for repealing the death penalty is that it’s an unnecessarily harsh punishment. Another explanation could be the idea that we, as a society, ought not to have the power to kill someone. If either of those is the case, executing the people remaining on death row would not be moral just because it would have been moral when the sentences were initially given. The decided morality of the present would apply, and thus O’Malley’s decision would be the moral one.
There is no metric to determine whether we should be working within the framework of the legal rational or the ethical reasoning, so it is difficult to conclusively determine what the correct answer would be. Nevertheless, this decision could have some interesting implications for O’Malley’s possible presidential bid for 2016. Making controversial decisions that are wildly unpopular with large groups of people (in this case even including fellow Democrats, such as Shellenberger) could adversely affect the possibility of even securing a party nomination. However, it is so rare to find politicians who will do what they believe to be right even in the face of negative public opinion that O’Malley might be more respected for his decision. This demonstration of value-strength could also benefit a possible presidential bid when O’Malley will be compared to other, more moderate candidates like Hillary Clinton.
Contact Mina Shah at minashah ‘at’ stanford.edu.