Support of the Death Penalty Isn’t Black and White

Most debate on the death penalty focuses on evidence that capital sentences are given out disproportionately to black criminals.  Specifically in the black community, it tends to be a debate on the criminal justice system and race.  But rarely is there public discussion of the victims of these crimes.

In the state of Maryland, Governor O’Malley and the state legislature have come to an “unsatisfactory compromise” according to Sunday’s Washington Post editorial board in repealing the state’s death penalty law.  To be sure, Democratic governor O’Malley and mostly every black state delegate in Maryland support its repeal. 

All except for black Maryland Delegate Craig Rice.

Marc Fisher writes in Sunday’s Washington Post about Delegate Rice’s childhood tragedy coloring, and clarifying, his view in support of the death penalty.   Though Rice was never one to discuss the brutal murder of his aunt, nephew, and their nurse while in college, the debate in the Maryland Senate compelled him to tell his story in hopes of sharing the views of the victims.

The phone call came in the middle of midterm exams at the University of Illinois. “We need you to come home,” Vivian Rice told her son, Craig. “Something’s happened to Aunt Millie.”

Craig Rice got on a plane and never returned to college in Illinois. When he arrived back home, he learned that his mother had walked five houses down from her own place in Silver Spring to see her sister. It was March 3, 1993, and Vivian Rice discovered a ghastly scene: Mildred Horn, 43, a flight attendant for American Airlines, shot dead, shot in the eye. Her 8-year-old son, Trevor, who suffered from a severe case of cerebral palsy, suffocated in his crib. Trevor’s overnight nurse, Janice Saunders, 38, shot dead, also in the eye, surrounded by pieces of a quilt she’d been sewing.

Sixteen years later to the day, Craig Rice was on the phone with his mother. It was the morning of the Maryland Senate’s vote on whether to go along with Gov. Martin O’Malley’s drive to repeal the death penalty. “I think I should tell my story,” Rice told his mother.

“Well, if that’s what you think it would take,” she replied.

Rice, now 36, is a first-term delegate in the Maryland House, representing Germantown, Potomac and an area from Montgomery’s rural north end down to North Bethesda. When he first ran in 2006, he said nothing about the murders that dominated his family’s lives for more than a decade. He never mentioned the trials, the appeals — nothing about the case that won national attention because the killer had been a hired hitman, employed by Aunt Millie’s ex-husband, who was scheming to get the $1.7 million trust fund set up for Trevor in a settlement with the hospital where he was born.

Although there is no denying the disproportionate number of blacks sentenced to death, there is no real discussion of support of the death penalty when it is deserved.  One can argue the morality of the death penalty.  However, for African Americans it has usually been a case of fairness, not morality.  So when it is fair, and it is proved, Maryland State Delegate Craig Rice believes in meting out the punishment.

… Rice approached the governor after O’Malley’s big Annapolis rally against capital punishment: “I spoke from my personal perspective, told him he wasn’t considering the victims. I felt somebody needed to stand up for families who believe the death penalty is the right punishment.”

Theirs was a polite, quick exchange; Rice knew he couldn’t persuade his fellow Democrat. But he wasn’t finished. On the morning of the vote, the delegate dashed off an e-mail to every senator: “I beg of you for my family and the numerous victims across the state, please do not repeal the death penalty. . . . Just 2 months ago, my mother called me at 3am in the morning because her alarm had gone off and told me that Perry was trying to get her. She and my family will never be the same.”

Rice doesn’t know if his plea changed any votes; he expects not. “On this issue, you’re either one way or the other,” he says. “There is no gray.”

He knows that he is the only black legislator who favors keeping the death penalty, that his position is at odds with most of his constituents’, and that there is good evidence that capital sentences are meted out disproportionately to black criminals.

“But the question is, are more people of color on death row because the system puts them there or are they committing more crimes because of unequal access to education and opportunity? The way I was raised, it was always to be held accountable for your actions,” Rice says. “People have to answer for whatever crimes they’ve done.”

He hears the arguments and reads the studies and comes back to this: Perry’s fingerprints were found on little Trevor’s breathing tube.

Read Marc Fisher’s entire column.

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