Equal Justice USA Press Release

Over 50 Law Enforcement Officials Call for Repeal
of Maryland’s Death Penalty
Prosecutors, Police and Correctional Officials say
Life Without Parole is More Effective

(ANNAPOLIS) – A group of 51 Maryland police, prosecutors and correctional officials today called on the General Assembly to repeal the death penalty, saying it is ineffective, wastes public safety resources and provides no additional security to police and prison employees.

The law enforcement officials urged life without parole as a more effective alternative tothe death penalty. The group released a letter signed by officials with nearly 500 years of law enforcement experience calling for repeal of the death penalty. Many of the signers had previously supported the death penalty but have since determined that it is a failed policy.

“I've been in this system for over 40 years. I’ve been held hostage and been through multiple prison riots,” Calvin Lightfoot, the former Maryland Secretary Public Safety and Correctional Services, said in a statement today. “If someone told me that the death penalty would protect me as a corrections officer, I would be offended. Safety inside prisons depends on proper staffing, programming, and effective reintegration of inmates back into society. The death penalty does not safeguard anybody.”

Two leading correctional officials, Gary J. Hilton, former warden of the maximum-security Trenton (N.J.) State Prison and the former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Corrections, and Gaithersburg resident John L. Clark, former warden of the federal prison in Marion, Illinois and Assistant Director at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, stressed today that prison security depends on adequate staffing and support, not on the death penalty.

James Abbott, police chief of West Orange, NJ, and a member of the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission, which recently recommended that state repeal its death penalty statute, described his change of opinion about the death penalty after going through the Commission’s lengthy hearings and deliberations.

“I didn’t go into my work on the Commission thinking I would vote to end the death penalty. But I learned in practice that a fair and effective death penalty system doesn’t exist,” Abbott said. “It doesn’t make sense to keep reaching for the impossible when the alternative of life in prison without parole can provide swift and harsh punishment without putting victims’ families through so much anguish.”

Law enforcement officials who signed the letter have come to support repeal because the number of reversals and the wasted resources make the death penalty a dangerous distraction rather than an effective crime-fighting tool.

“The law enforcement community has more important things to do than to chase a chimera, even for those who believe theoretically that capital punishment should be available,” said the Honorable Andrew Sonner, a retired judge from the Maryland Court of Special Appeals who also served as the Montgomery County State’s Attorney for a quarter century.

Legislation to repeal the death penalty and replace it with a sentence of life without parole is pending in the Maryland House of Delegates and Senate, with a Senate committee vote expected this week. Governor Martin O’Malley has come out strongly for repeal of the death penalty. Polling released by the Maryland Catholic Conference last month found that 61% of Marylanders also support the measure.

Executions in Maryland have been suspended since the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in December that the state had erred by not submitting the procedures for lethal injection to a review process overseen by the legislature, as done with all state regulations. Last week, the House Judiciary Committee killed legislation that would have exempted the lethal injection protocols from the review process and allowed executions to resume.

Read the letter.

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