With a murder rate of 9.8 per 100,000 people in 2007 (the most recent complete year available from FBI reports), Maryland had the second highest state murder rate in the nation. This tragedy is largely due to Baltimore's outrageously high murder rate, a city that Martin O'Malley ran before becoming governor. Given O'Malley's failure in Baltimore, his newest proposals should expect some skepticism.

Maryland's death penalty was re-enacted in 1978, and while the U.S. murder rate fell dramatically from 8.8 to 5.6 from then to 2007, Maryland's murder rate over the same period actually rose - going from 8.0 to 9.8. It is hardly a coincidence that only five convicted murderers have been executed in Maryland since 1978 - that is just five out of 13,947 murders. On the other side of the Potomac, the murder rate in Virginia, where capital punishment is enforced much more often, fell even faster than the national rate, dropping from 9.0 to 5.3.

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In preparation for this year's session, the governor stacked the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment - a group he helped create last year to make recommendations - with a reliably anti-death penalty majority.

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Possibly the weakest part of the commission's report was its unwillingness to consider the massive empirical research done by academics. For example, research by economists overwhelmingly shows that the death penalty saves lives. The published peer-reviewed research over the last decade that examined how the murder rates in states changed as they changed their execution rate found that each execution saved the lives of roughly 15 to 18 potential murder victims. Overall, the rise in executions during the 1990s accounted for about 12 to 14 percent of the overall large drop in murders during that time.