the commission

The Death Penalty Commission hearings are underway. Commissioners are hearing testimony from invited witnesses who speak for as long as necessary and the public who are asked to “make it brief.” Scott Shellenberger, State’s Attorney of Baltimore County, is overeager in his desire to discredit witnesses who discuss problems in the death penalty’s application. My hope is that even those who may be on his side of the issue will see through his transparent attempts to imply people like Deborah Fleischaker, former director of the ABA Moratorium Implementation Project are not credible. He accused her of traveling the country testifying that the death penalty wasn’t working. Well of course she travels speaking, she was the director of an implementation project and people wanted to hear the results. Commission Chair Benjamin Civiletti actually cut him off as he was starting to run down the list of places she’d spoken. The only pro-death penalty testimony heard from invited witnesses yesterday was from Phyllis Bricker, the daughter of the couple murdered by a man currently on Maryland’s death row. Her story is heartbreaking, her elderly parents were murdered 25 years ago and the case has been in and out of the courts that long. When she said she and her family have been waiting that long for “justice” Civiletti said “which you interpret to be his execution.” Finally. Someone points out that justice does not necessarily equal execution. Far too many people phrase it this way without even a second thought. I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched news reporters standing outside the SuperMax saying they were, we all were, waiting for “justice” to be done as if this were how we all thought about executions. When Civiletti made his remark she seemed not to even understand it, as if her singular interpretation was the only one possible. Justice requires fairness.

I was moved by the story told by a citizen witness of his violent father. The father tried to kill him and eventually murdered his step mother and step sister. He spoke of what it was like to be the son of a man convicted of murder, what it’d been like to testify at his father’s trial, and how the experiences had shaped him. His powerful story continued as he told of his nephew’s murder twenty years later. At the trial he spoke of seeing the to the son of a man who’d murdered his nephew and thinking about what this poor 9-year-old boy was going to have to go through. He never mentioned the death penalty. But his message was clear. Even a violent murderer has a family; his actions have an impact on those people too. The relationships are never simple, a web always connects us to one another. Even if the connections are invisible now, later they will manifest.