Poorly executed 'Death penalty' bill a waste of lawmakers' time

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Before they are finished for the session, members of the 122nd Maine Legislature will deal with some 2,000 bills this year.

Is there a need for that many new laws? Of course not.

Only about a third of these bills actually will find their way into the statute books, although perhaps "only" is not quite the right word. It is still represents a pretty hefty increase in the amount of regulation to be folded into the ever-growing body of state law.

Why should so many new proposals be introduced, anyway? You would think that after nearly two centuries' worth of statute writing, they would have gotten it about right by now, aside from budget matters and other stuff that needs revising and updating in the ordinary course of conducting the people's business.

Still, new bills get dropped in the hopper by the hundreds annually. It is the nature of the beast: Storekeepers keep stores, firefighters fight fires and lawmakers make laws.

Many of the "new" bills are in fact retreads of measures that come up time and again and almost never get anywhere.

My own personal nonfavorite among these recurring chestnuts is the death penalty, a proposal guaranteed to trigger a lot of overheated debate and not much else.

This hoary "oh no, not again" proposal is back once more this session. It has as little prospect of passage as countless other death penalty bills that have floated through the legislative chambers in the 118 years since Maine outlawed the practice.

The story of how this state became one of the earliest to ban capital punishment is familiar but bears repeating, if only to remind ourselves why we remain comfortable with that humanitarian decision.

Maine inherited the death penalty as part of a large body of laws from Massachusetts when we became a state in 1820. From the outset, however, it was clear we were never quite comfortable with our inheritance.

Within the first decade of statehood, the Legislature began to retreat from the harshness of the law by steadily reducing the list of capital crimes. Then, in 1837, lawmakers pretty much disengaged themselves from the law altogether, passing along all responsibility for carrying it out to the governor.

Anyone convicted of a capital crime was to be jailed for a year, after which it was left to the chief executive to assign an execution date. The governor hated this buck-passing arrangement and got around the law simply by ignoring it.

This continued until Maine's most famous military figure, Gen. Joshua Chamberlain, returned home following the Civil War and was elected governor. He promptly challenged the Legislature to abolish the death penalty or take back responsibility for putting convicts in the gallows.

The governor began signing death warrants for formerly spared miscreants, thereby getting the attention both of legislators and the public. This ploy, plus a couple of botched executions in the years ahead, led to a growing popular movement for abolition.

It took a couple of decades, but capital punishment in Maine was finally outlawed in 1887 following grisly news accounts of the prolonged hanging of Daniel Wilkinson, a British seaman convicted of the murder of a Bath policeman.

To say that we have never looked back since then would be incorrect. It has been brought up in the Legislature numerous times over the years, usually in some variation to make it apply to particularly unsympathetic offenders, such as cop killers or murderers of children.

In its latest incarnation, sponsored this year by Sen. Jonathan T.E. Courtney, R-Sanford, the penalty would apply to domestic violence cases ending in murder. Such deaths account for nearly half of all homicides committed in Maine. Courtney argues that that the threat of execution might lower the rate by getting abusers to think twice before making a deadly assault upon a relative.

The trouble with most of these efforts to revive capital punishment is that they are framed in that context of "sending a message" to a particular category of offenders rather than as a debate about the morality -- or immorality -- of state-sponsored killing in the name of vengeful justice.

However, there has never been any credible evidence that the death penalty has reduced crime. Indeed, Maine consistently registers one of the lowest crime rates per capita in the country.

I nominate this year's effort to restore capital punishment for two top awards in the "recurring bills" category: least likely to succeed and least worthy of consideration.

The Legislature did the right thing back in 1887. Let's leave it at that.

Jim Brunelle of Cape Elizabeth has commented on Maine issues for more than 35 years. He can be reached at jbrune@maine.rr.com.