Bishop Eugene Sutton of Maryland recently joined with bishops representing the Roman Catholic and United Methodist churches to urge state lawmakers to repeal the death penalty.
 
“How in the end does killing its citizens help the state to build the nonviolent, just and civil society that we all desire for ourselves and our children,” Bishop Sutton asked, as reported by the Baltimore Sun. “We are not going to kill our way out of a culture that is awash in violence.”
 
The three church leaders appeared before the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment, which held the third of our scheduled hearings Aug. 19 in Annapolis. Maryland has effectively had a ban on the use of its death penalty since December 2006 when the state’s highest court ruled that the execution protocols used to sentence and administer the death penalty were developed without sufficient legislative oversight or public input. The commission was established earlier this year to examine disparities in the application of the death penalty, the impact of DNA evidence and the cost differential between capital punishment and life imprisonment, the Sun reported.
 
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