I can make those predictions with a fair degree of confidence because this issue has been studied before, in Maryland and nationwide. In fact, it has been studied ad nauseam. The fingerprints of racial bias are all over the death penalty, and have been so since African-Americans became emancipated and thus eligible to be executed as citizens instead of as property. Today, the overwhelming majority of executions occur in the former slaveholding states of the Old South. Maryland, it should be noted, is a former slaveholding state.
Researchers can look for two years or they can take a decade.
When researchers take a good, long look at the people sentenced to die in Maryland, they will be hard put to demonstrate that those killers don't deserve the harshest punishment the state can deal out. Sometimes, statistics don't tell the tale. And so, I wonder whether all the passion and energy currently being expended in Annapolis isn't a waste of time. The pattern of racial disparity in the imposition of the death penalty is readily apparent. We don't need another study to tell us what we already know, and have known for decades.