Posted on 02/06/2006 8:09:20 PM PST by DuckFan4ever
Highest Md. court to hear lethal injection challenge, claim that race had role
Maryland's highest court halted Monday the scheduled execution of convicted murderer Vernon Lee Evans Jr., agreeing to hear his challenge to the state's lethal injection procedure, along with claims that race has played a role in his case
The Maryland Court of Appeals issued its orders on the first of five days when a death warrant authorized the state to put Evans to death for the 1983 contract killings of two Pikesville motel employees.
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
"Much has been said of the sanctity of human life, and the absurdity of supposing that we can teach respect for life by ourselves destroying it. But I am surprised at the employment of this argument, for it is one which might be brought against any punishment whatever... Does fining a criminal show want of respect for property, or imprisoning him, for personal freedom? Just as unreasonable is it to think that to take the life of a man who has taken that of another is to show want of regard for human life. We show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it, by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself, and that while no other crime that he can commit deprives him of his right to live, this shall.
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When there has been brought home to any one, by conclusive evidence, the greatest crime known to the law; and when the attendant circumstances suggest no palliation of the guilt, no hope that the culprit may even yet not be unworthy to live among mankind, nothing to make it probable that the crime was an exception to his general character rather than a consequence of it, then I confess it appears to me that to deprive the criminal of the life of which he has proved himself to be unworthy--solemnly to blot him out from the fellowship of mankind and from the catalogue of the living--is the most appropriate as it is certainly the most impressive, mode in which society can attach to so great a crime the penal consequences which for the security of life it is indispensable to annex to it. I defend this penalty, when confined to atrocious cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked--on that of humanity to the criminal; as beyond comparison the least cruel mode in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime... one of the strongest recommendations a punishment can have, that it should seem more rigorous than it is; for its practical power depends far less on what it is than on what it seems."
- John Stuart Mill, speech in Parliament defending capital punishment, 1868
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