Submitted by Dave
I wanted to tell you more about the new link that was posted on this site a few weeks ago.
We are a small but determined group that is trying to get the laws in Maryland changed so that violent offenders serve more time in Maryland’s prisons.
We have spent the last year and a half learning a lot about the criminal justice system in Maryland, and very little of it is good. A few things you should know:
- Violent offenders in Maryland’s prison system routinely earn 10 days per month — and sometimes as many as 20 days per month — off their sentences through early release, or good behavior, credits. Once the number of credits a violent inmate earns off of his sentence equals the number of days left on the sentence, the inmate’s early release is then mandatory.
- Maryland is the only state in the U.S. that allows sentence reconsiderations. Basically, an inmate has the right to go back to the judge that sentenced him and ask him to reconsider and possibly reduce the sentence he was issue. In this instance, the inmate is acknowledging guilt but telling the judge that he/she may have been too harsh with the sentence. Some violent offenders have managed to get their sentences reduced from many years to mere months through this mechanism.
– Maryland was ranked by the US Census Bureau as the fifth-most violent state in the nation, with a 51 percent recidivism rate among its convicted violent offenders.
Our movement surfaced following the April 13, 2008, robbery and murder of Lindsay Marie Harvey, a 25-year-old DNA analyst and Gaithersburg resident who was shot and killed by a repeat offender named Shawn Henderson as she tried to walk from her car to her apartment. Henderson had previously been sentenced to 60 years in prison for three very violent robberies he committed where he injured his victims with a knife, but he managed to get out of prison after serving just six years through a combination of mechanisms, among them early release credits and a reconsideration of his sentence (for the sake of brevity, I will give you the timeline of Henderson’s sentencing odyssey in a later post, but you can read more about it here and here).
Last spring, Sen. Nancy King and Del. Ben Kramer sponsored Senate Bill 354 and House Bill 581, respectively, which would have allowed violent offenders to receive only 15 percent of the time off their sentences through early release credits. But the legislation died in both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, which are chaired by Del. Joseph Vallario and Sen. Brian Frosh, respectively. These two men punted on this legislation despite bearing witness to strong support for it, including from other committee members, not to mention the heartfelt testimony of Debra Harvey, Lindsay Harvey’s mother, who traveled all the way to Annapolis from Oneonta, NY, and waited six hours for the hearing on Senate Bill 354 to start so she could give her testimony in person and plead with lawmakers to “examine your legal system, and examine your conscience.”
After the two bills were allowed to die in committee, I had a column published in the Washington Post basically calling out Frosh and Vallario for sitting on the legislation. Frosh shot back with a letter of his own to the Post, claiming to support tough sentences for violent offenders and implying that early release credits were not to blame for Lindsay Harvey’s murder (more on that, by the way, in a future posting). I’ve just posted links to both of these pieces in this paragraph. You be the judge.
Shawn Henderson, by the way, was convicted in February of Lindsay Harvey’s murder. On Aug. 5, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 20 years.
We are currently waiting to hear back from Sen. King and Del. Kramer as to whether they will be sponsoring a similar bill for the 2010 legislative session in Maryland.
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