"We write as mothers who have been scarred by the death penalty."

This op-ed that appeared in Friday's (2/16) Maryland Gazette was written by two mothers whose experiences give their voices immense weight in any death penalty discussion. One almost had her son executed for a crime he was later found innocent of and the other lost her daughter to a brutal rape and murder. Both of them are calling for an end to the death penalty.

I urge you to read this piece as it brings the individual human stories into the debate that are often lost in the statistics and semantics of the death penalty.