I knew Judge Dana Levitz.

He testified in Annapolis.

He taught a class at the University of Baltimore Law School right after mine. We said hello to each other every week.

I learned from his obituary that Levitz had prosecuted Anthony Grandison for a brutal double murder in 1983.

Grandison was one of the five inmates on death row when Maryland repealed the death penalty in 2013.

“If there is anything cruel and unusual about the death penalty, it is the never-ending litigation with its constant ups and downs” that makes life emotionally difficult for victims, defendants, and their families, Levitz wrote in 1989.

Unless the appeal process is shortened, he stated, “I don’t believe it is in the public’s interest to continue to pretend that Maryland has a death penalty.”

That’s one of the several reasons we gave for ending capital punishment, offered most profoundly by the parents of a daughter who was murdered.