Eliminating Questions of Life or Death

By Lori Montgomery

Monday, May 20, 2002; Page B01

TOWSON, Md. -- In the early 1980s, shortly after Maryland reinstated the death penalty, Baltimore County prosecutor Sandra A. O'Connor found herself contemplating the fates of two young men.

One was poor and black and had killed three people. He was represented by the public defender. The other was white and had raped and murdered his girlfriend's grandmother. He was represented by a "big, big, big, big" private law firm in Washington.

 Until then, O'Connor, the first woman and first Republican to serve as chief prosecutor in conservative Baltimore County, hadn't given much thought to the death penalty. To her, it was no great moral issue. It was just a sentence that was once again available for certain terrible crimes.

 But then the D.C. firm began calling every day, lobbying aggressively to persuade O'Connor to spare the white man's life. From the public defender, she heard nothing. And she began to wonder: What if I knew these D.C. lawyers? What if my best friend were handling a capital case? Could I make an impartial decision?

 No, O'Connor decided, she couldn't. No one could. So she adopted a policy that would take the decision out of her hands. Her office would seek the death penalty in both cases, and in every case that fit the legal definition of a capital crime. No plea bargains. No deals. Judges and juries would decide who lives and dies.

 Over the past two decades, that policy has come to define O'Connor as the state's deadliest prosecutor and has drawn national attention to capital punishment in Maryland. In a state dominated by liberal Democrats, O'Connor is the only prosecutor who regularly seeks and wins death sentences. Of the 13 men on death row, nine are from Baltimore County, the highest proportion from a single county anywhere in the nation.

 Of the three inmates executed since Maryland reinstated the death penalty in 1978, two were from the county.

 Death penalty opponents call O'Connor a zealot. They say no system can be fair when the location of a crime is the most important factor in deciding whether it will be punished by death. O'Connor says her system is colorblind, but skeptics point out that six of the nine condemned men are black and all of their victims were white.

 "You have to ask: Do only white people get murdered in Baltimore County?" said John Morris, an attorney for Eugene Colvin-El, a black man whose Baltimore County death sentence was commuted two years ago.

 Last week, when Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) stayed the execution of another Baltimore County killer and declared the nation's second moratorium on the death penalty, he cited the racial disparity, and Baltimore County's lopsided representation on death row, as the primary reasons.

 O'Connor is untroubled by the criticism. She said Glendening was wrong to halt the execution of a guilty man. And she has no intention of changing her policy, to start picking and choosing, weighing this and that, even consulting with defense attorneys, as some other prosecutors do.

 "It's not my job," O'Connor said. "In this jurisdiction, I firmly believe that that is not what I should be doing."

 A Popular Prosecutor

  O'Connor, 59, is an accidental prosecutor. She fell into law because chemistry seemed too hard. Otherwise, she wanted to be a pharmacist. And she fell into criminal law because corporate law seemed too boring. She worked for a year at the McCormick spice company before deciding that tax work was not sufficiently "people-oriented."

 O'Connor wound up in the Baltimore City prosecutor's office in 1967, hired to chase down deadbeat dads. Every now and then, she got a chance to assist one of the male prosecutors. One of them was impressed and helped her move up the ladder. She won her first capital case just before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death penalty nationwide in 1972.

 Two years later, Sam Green, then the Baltimore County prosecutor, was sent to prison after a sensational trial brought lurid revelations of extortion, expense-account fraud and, most notoriously, the hiring of dozens of women solely for their sexual skills.

 O'Connor decided to run. "For some reason, I thought, 'Oh, well, this would be a good idea,' " she said. "It was, like, forget about being a woman. They hadn't had a Republican in Baltimore County. I didn't know that. I thought, 'Thank God I live under a rock. Because if I knew any of this, I wouldn't do it.' "

 The Democratic nominee was Clarence Long III, son of a popular congressman who had "zero prosecutorial experience," O'Connor said. She won.

 Quickly, she set about restoring credibility to the office. She established a unit to assist victims of crime long before the victims' rights movement persuaded other prosecutors to do so. And she aggressively pursued tough sentences for repeat offenders, using a 1975 state law that most prosecutors rarely bothered with.

 Today, Baltimore area defense attorneys say her office is the best run in the state. They say O'Connor -- a sports nut who loves to gamble and married a homicide cop -- is decent, unpretentious and scrupulously fair. No one has run against her since 1986.

 "She could be the state's attorney here for a thousand years," said Lenny Shapiro, a criminal defense lawyer who once worked in O'Connor's office. "People love her."

 Faith in Her Convictions

 Across the nation, doubts about the death penalty have mounted along with the count of the mistakenly condemned. More than 100 people have been freed from death row since 1973, when the first modern death penalty laws were enacted.

 Maryland has had one near calamity: Kirk Bloodsworth, a former Marine with no previous criminal record, served nine years in prison, including two on death row, before DNA evidence cleared him of the 1984 killing of 9-year-old Dawn Hamilton.

 O'Connor's office prosecuted Bloodsworth. The crime has not been solved, and O'Connor said police still believe he did it.

 She is not sure, but the case gives her no pause. To the contrary, she said, Bloodsworth's death sentence had been overturned, and he had been resentenced to life in prison when prosecutors discovered in 1993 that the girl's underpants were stained with another man's DNA.

 "This was not clutching from death row. The process works," O'Connor said, noting that her office joined defense attorneys in seeking Bloodsworth's release "the day the results came in."

Does she worry that it could happen again? Not really, O'Connor said.

 "I think the system is just so careful here," she said. "Bloodsworth happened. But now, particularly with DNA, it gives you a lot more safeguards in trying cases. And juries are very, very particular."

 Differing Views

 Across Towson, the furor over the death penalty occasions much rolling of eyes.

 "To accuse her of any kind of racial bias is outrageous," said Gary S. Bernstein, a defense lawyer and self-described liberal Democrat.

 Shapiro, who opposes the death penalty, said O'Connor is "doing it the right way."

 "The fact that others are not casts her in this artificially bad light," he said. "Baltimore City is, like, the homicide capital of the planet. They're shooting babies on the street every couple of days. And I think the perception is that the office there has not aggressively pursued the death penalty in situations where it's warranted."

 Still, some think O'Connor's office could benefit from more discretion.

 Isaiah Dixon III is a defense lawyer who once worked for O'Connor, one of two black prosecutors in her office at the time. He believes O'Connor's decisions about the death penalty are indeed colorblind.

 Nonetheless, Dixon said he took advantage of an office policy that allows prosecutors to be excused from death penalty cases. He lost the taste for it, he said, after prosecuting Dionne Brooks, a young black woman who beat an older white woman to death in a drunken rage in 1993.

 Brooks had a history of sexual abuse and mental illness and no serious criminal record. "In my heart, I didn't think she deserved the death penalty," Dixon said.

 He asked the judge to impose it anyway, because that was his job. At sentencing, "you could hear a pin drop," he said. "It was just an eerie feeling."

 Dixon was relieved when the judge gave Brooks life without parole. Brooks, apparently, was not.

 On appeal, her attorneys argued that the judge had imposed a harsher sentence than if prosecutors had not sought her execution. The courts disagreed, and let her sentence stand.

 "She hung herself in prison in 1998," Dixon said. "A self-imposed death penalty."