In an edi­to­r­i­al writ­ten fol­low­ing the exe­cu­tion of Steven Oken in Maryland on June 17th, The Washington Post crit­i­cized the state’s flawed death penal­ty sys­tem and ques­tioned what pur­pose cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment serves. The edi­to­r­i­al stat­ed:

Steven Howard Oken went to his death this week in Maryland — the 1st exe­cu­tion in the state in 6 years, the 1st as well since Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) lift­ed his proces­sor’s mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions.

Mr. Oken was as good a can­di­date for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem typ­i­cal­ly coughs up. He was a triple mur­der­er who went on a ram­page in 1987. There was no ques­tion about his guilt. And the issue he was lit­i­gat­ing to stave off his exe­cu­tion — whether the man­ner in which Maryland car­ries out lethal injec­tion is too painful — seems as mor­bid as it is unim­por­tant. If the state may law­ful­ly strap some­one to a gur­ney and inject him full of poi­son, after all, the spe­cif­ic cock­tail of chem­i­cals it uses seems rather beside the point. Yet Mr. Oken’s death and the state’s resump­tion of exe­cu­tions ought to be the occa­sion for some reflec­tion: What exact­ly did Maryland accom­plish by killing him?

Unlike Virginia, where cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is a rel­a­tive­ly rou­tine event, Maryland does­n’t put many peo­ple to death. Mr. Oken is only the 4th since the Supreme Court rein­stat­ed the death penal­ty in 1976. Even if one believes that the death penal­ty serves as a deter­rent to crime, it is implau­si­ble that one invoked so rarely would do so. Nor can the state tru­ly claim that jus­tice — in some abstract sense — is aid­ed by its occa­sion­al use of the death penal­ty. For as a University of Maryland study showed last year, the state’s death penal­ty is so uneven­ly applied that sim­i­lar crimes sim­ply do not yield com­pa­ra­ble pun­ish­ments. Specifically, pros­e­cu­tors in Baltimore County are far more like­ly than those else­where to seek death, and mur­der­ers whose vic­tims are white are far more like­ly to face cap­i­tal charges than those who kill non-whites. The most pow­er­ful mes­sage the state’s death penal­ty sends is one of ran­dom­ness: that cer­tain crimes will arbi­trar­i­ly be sin­gled out for harsh­er pun­ish­ment than oth­ers.

About the only good that Maryland’s death penal­ty clear­ly yields is a sense of jus­tice in the fam­i­lies of vic­tims and, to a less intense degree, in oth­er cit­i­zens. That sense was much on dis­play after Mr. Oken’s death, and we don’t mean in any sense to belit­tle the sat­is­fac­tion that an exe­cu­tion may bring to these fam­i­lies. But it seems to us a sat­is­fac­tion bought at an unac­cept­ably steep price. For the death penal­ty is not mere­ly an irre­versible penal­ty, uneven­ly applied and fraught with grave dan­ger of error. It involves the state in the pre­med­i­tat­ed killing of an indi­vid­ual long since pre­vent­ed from doing fur­ther harm to soci­ety. Even when that indi­vid­u­al’s guilt is clear, that killing is still wrong — and the pow­er to car­ry it out is more pow­er than any state should have.

(The Washington Post, June 19, 2004)(emphasis added). See Editorials.

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