BALTIMORE – Today’s scheduled execution of a man convicted of two murders in Maryland and one in Maine has been put off indefinitely.

A Baltimore County prosecutor said Friday she will not ask a judge this week to set an execution date for Steven Oken as planned, and may not ask for a death warrant for a second inmate because of a ruling by the state’s highest court.

Oken was convicted of killing Dawn Garvin and his sister-in-law Patricia Hirt in Maryland. Both murders took place in November 1987.

He also was convicted of killing Lori Ward, a clerk at a Kittery, Maine, motel where he had stopped after the two earlier killings. He was taken into custody in Freeport, the day after the Ward murder.

Oken, 39, was sentenced to death in the Garvin case. He received life sentences on the second Maryland conviction and his conviction in Maine.

Baltimore County State’s Attorney Sandra O’Connor said she still planned to ask a judge on Tuesday to set an execution date for Wesley Baker, but admitted that she would not seek the death warrant if Baker’s attorneys file the same appeal as Oken. Baker was convicted of the 1991 killing and robbery of a woman in Maryland.

“There’s no sense in putting the families through this over and over again. The process is already too long,” O’Connor said.

Maryland’s highest court agreed Thursday to review Oken’s case in light of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a New Jersey hate-crime case. The Court of Appeals indicated it would not schedule a hearing in the case until September.

The Supreme Court struck down the New Jersey hate-crime law, ruling that an aggravating factor – in this case, that race was the motivating factor – had to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to increase a defendant’s sentence beyond the maximum allowed under the statute.

In Maryland, jurors decide whether to impose the death penalty by determining whether aggravating factors outweigh mitigating factors by a preponderance of the evidence, a standard not as strict as the reasonable doubt standard.

The Supreme Court ruling throws the constitutionality of that standard into doubt.

Oken and Baker were expected to die by lethal injection along with two other men this summer. State prosecutors say the death penalty is the maximum allowed under Maryland law, and the New Jersey ruling does not affect Maryland cases.

Earlier this week, the General Assembly declined to vote on a proposed moratorium on the death penalty. Supporters had asked for a ban to allow University of Maryland researchers time to complete a study on whether the application of the death penalty in Maryland is racially biased.

State Sen. Walter Baker, who opposed the moratorium, said the timing on the court of appeals decision “certainly looks suspicious.”

“I don’t really know whether our Court of Appeals is playing politics or performing their assigned duty interpreting the law,” said the Cecil County Democrat, who chairs the Senate’s Judicial Proceedings Committee.

Baker said the court’s decision this week is just the latest example of judges intruding in areas intended for legislators.

“I just believe that our courts should respect the separation of powers a little more than they do,” Baker said.