The U.S. state Maryland executed Wesley Baker on this date in 2005 — the last man ever put to death there.
Baker accosted* a 49-year-old woman named Jane Frances Tyson in the parking lot of a Catonsville shopping mall after she’d finished shoe-shopping, shooting her point-blank while two young grandkids looked on in order to grab her purse. Had Baker and his getaway driver/accomplice Gregory Lawrence not been captured almost immediately — a bystander noted the license plate and called it in — they’d have had $12 to share.
Baker’s life, too, was cheap, according to a Washington Post profile.
Born unwanted to a teenage mother, he was sexually abused by age 5 and was using heroin regularly by age 10, his attorneys wrote in the petition to the governor. By 14, Baker was living with a prostitute twice his age, trading sex for drugs. He became a father the next year.
Maryland was a halfhearted readopter of the death penalty in its late-20th century “modern” era in the U.S., and by the 2000s Baker’s execution was delayed for a moratorium to study racial inequity in the system. After concluding that, yes, racial bias was rife in the Maryland capital punishment system, the state went ahead and executed him anyway.
But this proved to be a throwback to a disappearing law-and-order era. The very next year, complications with the state’s lethal injection procedures led Maryland courts to suspend executions, a situation that transitioned into another moratorium and eventually, in 2013, outright abolition. Maryland today has no death penalty, and its last four pre-abolition condemned prisoners had their sentences commuted on December 31, 2014 by outgoing Governor Martin O’Malley.
* Baker argued deep into his appeals that Lawrence was, or at least might have been, the gunman; the Fourth Circuit federal court of appeal agreed that proof that Baker fired the shot “was not overwhelming,” but did not mitigate the sentence.
On this day..
- 1805: Gabriel Aguilar and Manuel Ubalde, abortive Peruvian rebels
- 1705: Edward Flood and Hugh Caffery
- 1998: Cheung Tze-keung, Hong Kong kidnapper
- 999: Elisabeth of Vendome, by her husband Fulk Nerra
- 1806: Jesse Wood, filicide
- 1774: Peter Galwin, pedophile, and John Taylor, zoophile
- 2012: Richard Stokley, while his accomplice goes free
- 1831: John Bishop and Thomas Head, the London Burkers
- 1640: Bishop John Atherton, buggerer
- 1950: Werner Gladow, teen Capone
- 1939: The 18 corpses of the rebellion
- 63 B.C.E.: Publius Cornelius Lentulus
- Themed Set: The Fall of the Roman Republic