Credit: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
Anti–death penalty advocate Shujaa Graham, who was exonerated from death row in California, reacts to Maryland's recent death penalty ban.
By: David A. Love
The Nation
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Recently I was at the State House in Annapolis when Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley made history, erasing a centuries-old practice with the stroke of a pen. On May 2, O’Malley signed a law repealing the death penalty, making it the eighteenth state to abolish capital punishment as well as the sixth state in six years—after New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Illinois and Connecticut.
Standing with me were two men with a very personal stake in the governor’s actions: Kirk Bloodsworth and Shujaa Graham, both of whom had been exonerated. They are just two of the 142 death row prisoners over the past forty years who have been released because they were innocent: Graham was number twenty, and Bloodsworth was number forty-eight. Along with organizers and lawmakers, many of these exonerated death row survivors—who spend an average of ten years on death row for crimes they did not commit—are leading the charge to halt executions throughout America.
