Inquirer Editorial: Maryland has done it; time to kill death penalty

When the panel submits its report by year's end, it's likely Keystone State officials will have a full picture of all the ways that capital punishment fails the state's citizens - and then take the "prudent" next step.

Make no mistake, O'Malley also fought for repeal of the death penalty on moral grounds, calling capital punishment "unjust as historically applied" and citing "imperfections [that] can and do result in the occasional killing of innocent people." It's the risk of such tragic injustices that has prompted even the deeply split U.S. Supreme Court to narrow the application of capital punishment, banning it for juveniles and the mentally impaired.

In addition to lessening the risk of sending the wrong person to death row - which Pennsylvania has done, although, fortunately, it exonerated some defendants in time - Maryland, the first Southern state to ban executions, wanted to halt the endless litany of legal appeals inherent in the system. The inevitable appeals are costly, but they are also critical to assuring that a badly flawed system doesn't make more mistakes.

Without such an appeal, the Corbett administration in November would have proceeded with the state's first execution in 50 years of a death-row inmate who was still fighting his sentence.

Halting executions would also be in line with the effort by Corbett's state corrections chief, John Wetzel, to reduce Pennsylvania's inmate population, both to save money and to apply alternatives to incarceration that have been shown to reduce recidivism.

The fact that poor and minority defendants are more likely to face the death penalty only adds to the litany of flaws in capital punishment that should lead to the timely demise of death row.