Steve Burns
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON – (WMAL) A Maryland State Senator said he plans to introduce a bill to reinstate the death penalty in Maryland following the the shooting last week of five employees of a granite supply shop in Harford County. Three people were killed, and the suspect, Radee Prince, allegedly shot another man in Delaware before his capture.
Sen. Bob Cassilly (R-Havre de Grace) announced his intentions at a press conference held to update Prince’s legal status. Cassilly’s brother, Harford County State’s Attorney Joe Cassilly, announced Prince would face trial in Delaware first, then expressed his dismay that Prince’s maximum penalty for one attempted murder in Delaware would be the same as Maryland’s penalty for three murders.
“Maryland needs to have an alternative punishment that really deals justice in this kind of case,” Bob Cassilly said.
His bill would put the death penalty back on the table for cases involving murders of two or more people in a single incident, serial murders, murders of law enforcement performing official duties, murder of a witness to a crime that carries maximum penalties, murder that occurs during a first-degree rape or first-degree sex offense, and a murder during the commission of a hate crime.
Cassilly’s bill also specifies the method of execution: a mixture of fentanyl and heroin, an effort to draw attention to the state’s opioid epidemic.
“What we’ve seen that a mix of heroin and fentanyl obviously must not be too painful, because we see people on the verge of death, probably practically dead, we pump them up on Narcan, they turn back around, and they want to do it again,” Cassilly said. “It’s hard to imagine that that can be a painful death, otherwise we wouldn’t see this happening repeatedly.”
Cassilly said the death penalty repeal essentially amounted to offering criminals a “license to kill.”
“Once you’ve killed the first one, you’re already eligible for the maximum penalty,” he said. “It’s perverse that there’s an incentive for you to keep on killing.”
Del. Sandy Rosenberg (D-Baltimore City) said he doubted Prince put that amount of thought into his actions.
“This is not somebody who is making a rational decision as to the consequences of his criminal acts,” Rosenberg told WMAL.
Rosenberg said lawmakers had mounds of evidence of the death penalty’s costs, inequities, and ineffectiveness when it was repealed in 2013, and doubted one case will sway them to reverse the move.
“Life without parole is a suitable, and is the right penalty for someone who commits the kind of heinous offense that this individual did,” he said.
It’s not unusual to see lawmakers in states that have abolished the death penalty attempt to reinstate it. It usually comes as a reaction to a heinous crime, said Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham.
“So far, there’s no legislature that has taken the step back that considered the death penalty’s failures as a policy, who has said, ‘Well, here’s an individual case that warrants it, let’s bring back the entire failed program,” Dunham told WMAL.
Dunham said evidence has shown the death penalty is not an effective deterrent, as Cassilly suggested.
“What we see is, historically, year after year, the murder rates tend to be higher in states that have the death penalty than in states that don’t have the death penalty,” he said.
The bill’s political prospects may be challenging, as Maryland’s Democrat-controlled legislature has only moved further left since 2013.
“The General Assembly spent years getting to the point where it felt comfortable repealing the death penalty. The Assembly has not become in any way more conservative in the time since that happened,” St. Mary’s College political scientist Todd Eberly told WMAL. “I don’t think that this one heinous act would be enough that it would make people decide ‘Well, you know what, if we had the death penalty, then this person wouldn’t have done it.'”
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