Bill seeks to revive Maine death penalty

AUGUSTA – A Sanford lawmaker is sponsoring a bill to bring back the death penalty in domestic-violence murder cases in Maine.

Republican Sen. Jonathan Courtney said it’s time for the state to get tougher on domestic violence by imposing the ultimate penalty on people convicted of killing their current or former spouses or partners.

Courtney said his bill, which has yet to be drafted, is designed “to prevent domestic violence and to make people think twice about it before they go battering a spouse.”

The time has come “to try something stronger or more forceful” because domestic violence remains a big problem despite efforts to prevent it, he said.

The bill is likely to face an uphill fight in the state Senate and House. The Legislature has a long history of rejecting capital punishment, including bills in recent years that would have reinstated the death penalty for police killers or child murderers.

Legislative leaders in both parties said Courtney’s bill would probably go down to defeat. Democratic state Sen. Joseph Perry of Bangor said the bill would “be put to death” for several reasons, including that capital punishment sometimes claims the lives of innocent people.

Domestic violence accounted for about 45 percent of all Maine homicides between 1985 and 2003, according to the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence.

Still, “there really is no deterrent” in many domestic-violence homicides because the abusers are so obsessed with killing their victims that they are indifferent to the legal consequences, said Kim Roberts, executive director of the coalition.

Roberts said her coalition has not taken a position on the death penalty, but she noted that abuse victims are sometimes convicted of murdering their abusers, so if Maine restored the death penalty in domestic-violence cases “you could have a victim who is put to death for killing their own abuser.”

Maine abolished the death penalty two years after Daniel Wilkinson was hanged at the Maine State Prison in 1885 for killing Bath constable William Lawrence during an attempted burglary.

Newspaper accounts of the hanging said that Wilkinson suffered a slow, gruesome death, leading the Legislature to get rid of the death penalty in 1887.