NY Times – Less Culpable, but With Longer Sentences

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Patrick Bearup, 36, at the Fourth Avenue Jail in Phoenix, received the death penalty after he was convicted of kidnapping and first-degree murder.

By FERNANDA SANTOS

Published: April 5, 2013

PHOENIX — Members of a white supremacy group descended on a home here 11 years ago to scare a man into paying back the $200 his roommate had accused him of stealing. The attack ended in the man’s death.

Three of the four people who were eventually arrested brokered plea deals, avoiding a trial. The roommate, Jessica Nelson, 37, who instigated the beating, and a skinhead recruit named Jeremy Johnson, 30, who pummeled the man, Mark Mathes, with a baseball bat, could be out of prison in four years. Sean Gaines, who shot Mr. Mathes as he was thrown naked from a car onto a county road, is scheduled for release in 2028, at the age of 47.

Only one of the perpetrators, a young man who by all accounts was not directly involved in the killing, received the death penalty. Patrick Bearup, 36, who helped dispose of Mr. Mathes’s body and severed one of its fingers to retrieve a ring, was convicted of kidnapping and first-degree murder.

Opinion – Wash. Post: The much-needed demise of Maryland’s death penalty

By Editorial Board, Published: March 25

MARYLAND IS SET to become the 18th state to scrap the death penalty, the sixth since 2007 and the first south of the Mason-Dixon line. The repeal, having now passed both houses of the General Assembly, is a major achievement for Gov. Martin O’Malley, who pushed hard for it, and for his fellow Democrats, who dominate the state legislature.The measure replaces capital punishment with a life sentence without the possibility of parole; the governor is expected to sign the legislation in the coming weeks. Maryland voters are likely to have the last word if, as expected, death-penalty supporters collect enough signatures to petition the new law to referendum, probably in 2014.

Baltimore Sun – Ending executions in Maryland

Our view: Gov. O’Malley should use the historic occasion provided by the repeal of capital punishment to commute the sentences Maryland’s death row inmates to life without parole

4:01 p.m. EDT, March 18, 2013

Having won approval in both chambers of Maryland’s General Assembly, a landmark bill to abolish the state’s death penalty awaits only Gov. Martin O’Malley‘s signature before becoming law. It is a tremendous political and moral victory for Mr. O’Malley, a long-time opponent of capital punishment who campaigned for a repeal during his first term only to come up short.

That leaves only one major item of unfinished business on his agenda regarding the issue: Commuting the sentences of the five men currently on Maryland’s death row to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The governor must use the historic opportunity presented by the abolition of capital punishment in Maryland to unequivocally put an end to the last vestiges of this barbaric practice in the state’s prisons.