A Times Editorial

A governor's conscience

"It is not appropriate to proceed with an execution when there is any level of uncertainty, as the death penalty is final and irreversible. Therefore, I have commuted his sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole . . ." - MARYLAND GOV. PARRIS GLENDENING

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 9, 2000

If there's any such thing as a textbook execution, the death of Bennie Demps wasn't. It took his executioners 33 minutes to find a "suitable vein," as the official statement put it. "They butchered me," he said before the lethal drugs began to flow. That isn't what the Legislature bargained for when it retired Florida's electric chair.

But the more troubling issue attending his death was whether Demps was guilty of the crime for which he was to die. There was some doubt about that, but not enough to impress the courts or Gov. Jeb Bush.

On the same day, Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening commuted the death sentence of a killer whom he said he believed to be guilty, but not to "the same level of absolute certainty" as in the cases of two men he had not spared.

In his executive order, Glendening addressed the two points that most other pro-death penalty governors overlook too often and too easily.

"It is not appropriate to proceed with an execution when there is any level of uncertainty, as the death penalty is final and irreversible," he said. "Therefore, I have commuted his sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole . . ."

Eugene S. Colvin-el, who was convicted of the 1980 murder of 82-year-old Lena Buckman of Cocoa Beach during a burglary at her daughter's Maryland home, would have been the first person to die in Maryland solely on circumstantial evidence. His fingerprints were found on glass broken from a basement door and he pawned two watches stolen from the house.

But police conceded the door could have been opened only four inches and there was no evidence to place Colvin-el inside the house or eliminate the possibility, suggested by unidentified fingerprints on items in the victim's handbag, that he had a collaborator who did the actual killing. This was critical to the certainty of guilt that Glendening found lacking. Under Maryland law, as explained by two dissenting judges in Colvin-el's appeal,"the death penalty may not be imposed unless the defendant was the actual perpetrator of the murder." The only exception is a murder-for-hire.

"Surmise," added the dissenters, "simply is not acceptable as proof."

Glendening, who had refused calls for a moratorium focusing on apparent racial disparity in death sentencing, commuted Colvin-el's sentence within hours of the 5-2 Court of Appeals decision that upheld it. The dissenters also found there was "little or no rationality" in Maryland's death penalty, which "disproportionately falls on poor African-American males accused of murdering white victims."

Agonizing uncertainties about guilt and fairness are hardly unique to Maryland, as seen by Illinois Gov. George Ryan's decision to declare a moratorium; the New Hampshire Legislature's vetoed bill to repeal the death penalty; conservative evangelist Pat Robertson's call for a moratorium; and Texas Gov. George W. Bush's decision to reprieve an inmate to allow DNA testing. But in Florida, retired Chief Justice Gerald Kogan is a lonely voice in a wilderness of arrogant certitude.

Glendening, who used to be a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, grew up in Florida and earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at Florida State University. FSU can be proud of him. So can the people of Maryland.

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