New Jersey Could Kill the Death Penalty

article | posted January 7, 2007 (web only)
New Jersey Could Kill the Death Penalty
Patrick Mulvaney

From the lethal injection disaster in Florida (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1214-03.htm) to the hanging (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070108/rule_of_noose) of Saddam Hussein in US-occupied Iraq, the death penalty's public image in America suffered a series of setbacks in the closing weeks of 2006. None of those setbacks, however, bolstered the national abolition movement as substantially as the recommendation by a New Jersey legislative panel, made public Tuesday, that the Garden State should eliminate capital punishment.

Twelve of the thirteen members of the bipartisan panel, officially known as the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission (http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/committees/njdeath_penalty.asp), concurred in the abolition recommendation. Moreover, the twelve-member majority offered a thoughtful nod to the exorbitant cost of capital punishment, suggesting that New Jersey should direct any financial savings resulting from abolition toward benefits and services for victims' family members. Given that the panel's lone dissenter sponsored the state's existing death penalty statute decades ago, the recommendations are likely to carry significant weight in Trenton. Governor Jon Corzine, a longtime opponent of the death penalty, expressed support for the recommendations immediately, and State Senate President Richard Codey told Newark's Star-Ledger that passage of an abolition bill is now "more than likely."

New Jersey, which reinstated the death penalty in 1982 but has not carried out a single execution since, appears set to reverse a national trend dating back to 1972. That year--in response to the US Supreme Court's June ruling in Furman v. Georgia, which invalidated all existing death penalty statutes throughout the nation--states began crafting new, refined statutes, effectively launching the modern era of capital punishment. When the Court approved the return of the death penalty in 1976, the three-Justice plurality noted that thirty-five states had passed new capital punishment statutes in the four years following Furman, thereby demonstrating "society's endorsement of the death penalty."