O’Malley goes slow on death-penalty rules

ANNAPOLIS — Gov. Martin O’Malley yesterday said he will not draft court-ordered regulations required to reinstate Maryland’s death penalty until the General Assembly has had another opportunity to repeal the punishment.

“We have to see what the next session brings before we get to the point of saying it’s time to put in the new regulations,” said Mr. O’Malley, a Democrat. “I don’t think we should put in regulations for the administration of a penalty that can never, ever be reversed — and it appears to be on its way out in the currents of history.”

The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in December that the state’s rules for lethal injection are unconstitutional and barred further executions until the state developed regulations governing a new process for lethal injection.

Mr. O’Malley’s unwillingness to rewrite the regulations amounts to a ban on executions that some say the governor aims to preserve until he can convince lawmakers to repeal the death penalty through legislation.

“Those people in charge of drafting the regulations, they don’t want the death penalty in the first place,” said Senate Minority Leader David R. Brinkley, Frederick Republican. “I think Maryland needs the death penalty. We’ve already shown that we’re extremely slow in using it.”

Mr. O’Malley, an opponent of capital punishment, earlier this year supported a bill introduced in the General Assembly repealing the state’s death penalty. He also testified against the death penalty at legislative hearings in February.

The proposal to repeal the death penalty died in a Senate committee by a one-vote margin.

Mr. O’Malley said yesterday that he hopes a change in the makeup of the Senate will aid efforts to remove the death penalty.

He is expected this week to approve Delegate Nancy J. King, a Montgomery Democrat and death-penalty opponent, to fill the Senate seat vacated by former Sen. Patrick J. Hogan, a Montgomery Democrat and death-penalty supporter.

But the point could be moot if the makeup of the Judicial Proceedings Committee, which narrowly voted to support the death penalty this year, does not change.

Mrs. King will sit on the Budget and Taxation Committee.

The de facto ban is similar to the one former Gov. Parris N. Glendening, a Democrat, signed in 2002. He stayed executions pending the findings of a University of Maryland study on the relationship between race and capital punishment.

Former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican who lost to Mr. O’Malley in November, reinstated the death penalty in 2003.

Two convicts were executed during Mr. Ehrlich’s term.

Six inmates remain on Maryland’s death row.