Martin O’Malley Calls For End to Maryland Death Penalty
Posted on February 22, 2007
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Maryland’s New Governor, Martin O’Malley is seeking an end to Maryland’s Death Penalty. The move is good government policy and is correct from both moral and ethical points of view.
O’Malley is taking good advantage of a change in mood around the country, questioning the death penalty, as we continue to assimilate more data and anecdotal evidence that it is administered unevenly and unfairly, being issued more often when those convicted are minorities or of few economic means.
That DNA evidence has been used successfully to exonerate those both condemned and killed by the state helps him to build the most popularly accepted argument in his case.
from the Washington Post:
“Can the death penalty ever be justified as public policy when it inherently necessitates the occasional taking of a wrongly convicted, innocent life?”
O’Malley makes the arguments that will win him the votes he needs to pass the measure, which you can read in his op-ed. These focus on the well-supported evidence that death is not a deterrent to violent crime, and that it is not good fiscal policy.
There are much more compelling arguments, from my point of view, but they don’t seem to have popular political support.
Any voter who claims to be informed by their Christian faith should be moved by the idea of redemption. While the truly violent and those who have done tremendous wrongs must remain in jail for whatever their sentence, there is the opportunity, while they’re still alive, for a change of heart or religious conversion. Those Christians who advocate the death penalty seem to want to foreclose on the convicted’s potential for salvation, thus stepping in and passing God-like judgement on that person’s eternity.
There is also the arguments to be made for the sanctity of life:
We have all these good people in our churches, in public office, and on Sunday morning talk shows who like to talk about zygotes in petri dishes and embryos in freezers, of biomedical research, and of Terri Schiavo. They love to talk about the sanctity of life. That is, that life itself, is sacred or holy. At what point in a man’s life is his life no longer holy? Can his actions negate sanctity, or does the sacred come from God? Why is is so hard to say we abhor a man’s behavior, but the spark of life in him, which comes from God, we can not take away? If we can say it to protect a cluster of cells in a petri dish, why not for a man — whatever the condition of his soul or of his karma?
Abolishing the death penalty should be a conservative issue. Most conservative Catholics already understand that. In addition to the question of the sanctity of life, it’s fiscally sound policy, does not satisfy deterrence, and is arguably an overextension of government power and raises several constitutional questions.
The death penalty continues to exist in the U.S. only because of demagoguery. Politicians play to people’s basest fears desires for vengeance, and want to be seen as strong on “law and order.” They ignore the fact that the solution they promote does nothing to make us safer and there is no legitimate government role in seeking vengeance.
Martin O’Malley in the finest expression of leadership, summarizes his op-ed by seeking to preserve what is best in us:
Human dignity is the concept that leads brave individuals to sacrifice their lives for the lives of strangers. Human dignity is the universal truth that is the basis of ethics. Human dignity is the fundamental belief on which the laws of this state and this republic are founded. And absent a deterrent value, the damage done to the concept of human dignity by our conscious communal use of the death penalty is greater than the benefit of even a justly drawn retribution.
Amen.
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5 Responses to “Martin O’Malley Calls For End to Maryland Death Penalty”
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Nice site.
Thanks Brian. Still getting the technical details worked out. I am happy to be using your Del.icio.us Tagger plug-in. I’ve just set it up so have not yet evaluated it. Anything that helps get me tagged, get the word out, and uses automation to get the job done is worth a look.
You said: “The move is good government policy and is correct from both moral and ethical points of view.” His decision may be correct from a moral and ethical point of view, but it is highly hypocritical when you combine this view with his view on abortion. How can you say that killing murderers is wrong, but killing unborn children is okay??? You can ban both. That would satisfy the moral and ethical argument at the same time. You can allow both. At least this view is consistant in regard to human life. You can be opposed to abortion and be in favor of the death penalty using innocense as the defense. However, favoring abortion and being against the death penalty is one of the most morally reprehensible views known to civilized man.
Gerard, thanks for the comment. I agree that many people are inconsistent on pro-life. I consider myself pro-life and manage my own contradictions as best I can.
Many of us who support a woman’s right to choose, perhaps a majority of us, are not “pro-abortion.” I would support public policies that go to great lengths to prevent abortion, including, but not limited to comprehensive sex education, making birth control accessible and widely available, even free to any who need it. I’d support programs that make it easer for a woman to choose to carry an unplanned child to term. These would have to help young women continue their educations in the event of pregnancy, somehow (I have no ideas) make adoption easier on the biological parents, and of course providing day-care and financial support for young mothers in need.
Churches are free to teach ethics, morality, and personal responsibility to their members, and I can’t imagine broad objections to religious groups and even some limited government involvement in creating media and advertising designed to create an environment that supports young parents or to promote pregnancy prevention.
I think if half of the energy put into opposing abortion was put into honest, realistic pregnancy prevention and pregnancy support, we’d have a small fraction of the abortions that we have today.
In the end, there will still be unwanted pregnancies. In the end there will still be abortions. That will be true even if abortion were illegal. It was true when abortion was illegal. The wealthy will know someone who knows someone who will provide safe abortions for a fee. The poor will get back alley abortions with all the risks, including hemorrhage, infection, and death.
Further, while I find abortion a very troubling moral issue, I don’t agree that abortion is the equivalent of killing an adult human being. In the time of the writing of Leviticus, it was considered punishable by death for a man to “spill his seed on the ground.” There wasn’t much scientific understanding at all in those days, but some must have believed that was somehow equivalent to how Christian conservatives view abortions today.
I don’t know at what point the building blocks for human life become a human life. I don’t believe those people who say they do. Why is a fertilized egg—two cells, four cells, eight cells—more human than the egg or the sperm itself? If not eight cells, what about two dozen? It’s all morally gray.
There comes a point when a fetus can survive outside the womb, “viability” that everyone agrees is a life. Unfortunately even at that stage and later there are circumstances where a doctor or an expectant parent will have to choose whether to deliver a child or spare the mother’s life. Thank God that as medical science and technology improves those cases become rarer and rarer.
Then there is all the time in-between fertilization and implantation and viability where, for me, because there is a question, I hope I would choose to err on the side of preserving life. My own sensibilities lead me to err on the side of life much earlier than some people would. I’m pretty unapologetic about that.
And what about embryos that are created for fertility treatments that will never be implanted. There will never be enough “snowflake” moms to carry to term all those would-be “snowflake babies.” What about fetuses that are determined by modern medicine to have defects that will lead to lives of suffering? Do we allow people to choose to abort those fetuses? How bad would the defect have to be? Downs’ syndrome? That hardly seems right. No functioning brain beyond an autonomic nervous system? Why force anyone to carry such a fetus as that to term?
You see, it’s all questions. I can appear to be pretty arrogant at times, but I’m not arrogant enough to tell all people how they should slice all these difficult ethical and moral situations regarding fertility and pregnancy. I want people to make the right choices, I just don’t believe I can tell them what the right choice is for all times and circumstances.
I think these issues would actually be easier if we did not become so polarized. I think far fewer people would fight for “abortion on demand” if far fewer people called all abortions, no matter how early, murder.
It’s my hope that if we could move more people to common ground and give strong social support both to preventing pregnancy and to supporting pregnancy and young families, we’d have far fewer abortions than surely we’d have if we just made all abortions illegal and then conveniently swept the issue under the rug.
The ethics of terminating a pregnancy due to the perceived suffering of the child should it be born with a severe disability is a very hard one. I am prolife but no mother wants to see their child suffering or in pain. I have a son with a disability and I wouldn’t change him for anything. We are lucky that his disability doesn’t prevent him leading a full and productive life. Providing some support to ’stay at home moms’ would also be beneficial, though not always practical.