New Jersey likely to abolish the death penalty
 

N.J. death penalty on way out
The Legislature is moving to abolish it after a report called it costly and pointless.
By Troy Graham
Inquirer Staff Writer
Jan. 3, 2007
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/n...l/16370503.htm

The New Jersey Legislature will move to abolish the death penalty after a report released yesterday found that capital punishment is costly to taxpayers and serves no "legitimate... intent."

The state has not executed anyone since 1963, and has only nine men on death row. Marko Bey, the longest-serving inmate, has been there since 1983.

A 13-member commission, established last year to study the issue, recommended in its report that the death penalty be replaced with life in prison without parole.

"There is increasing evidence that the death penalty is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency," the commission wrote. "Executing a small number of persons guilty of murder is not sufficiently compelling to justify the risk of making an irreversible mistake."

Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts (D., Camden) said he supports abolishing the death penalty, but he didn't think the Assembly would take up the issue for a few months, until it resolves the sticky property-tax reform issue.

"Effectively, we've had a death penalty moratorium for over 40 years," he said. "A lot of us have been waiting for the commission report before we went into high gear."

A bill to abolish the death penalty has been introduced with 11 cosponsors in the Assembly, Roberts said.

"We have to build consensus," he said. "I'm sure we'll be able to do that."

A bill to get rid of the death penalty also is being written in the Senate, and Senate President Richard J. Codey (D., Essex) said he expects lawmakers to take up the issue by July. He too noted that New Jersey's death penalty law is, practically, dormant. "The way it's going, you'd have to be older than God himself to be put to death," Codey said.

In a statement, Gov. Corzine said he has long opposed the death penalty, and he looked "forward to working with the Legislature to implement the recommendations outlined in this report."

Death penalty opponents believe lawmakers will move quickly.

"It's time for the Legislature to act. It's past time for the death penalty to go," said Celeste Fitzgerald, with New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. "It's a distraction from justice."

Republicans and death-penalty proponents blasted back at the report and at the Democrat-led Legislature, which recently passed bills to provide clean needles to drug addicts and civil unions for same-sex couples.

"The Trenton Democrats now propose to eliminate capital punishment for cop killers, terrorists and sexual predators who murder children," said Sen. Nicholas Asselta (R., Cumberland). "The Democrats' radical agenda is out-of-touch with the values of millions of New Jerseyans."

The commission said the death penalty does not deter crime and does not help murder victims' families, who are forced to endure a long appeals process. The commission also said the death penalty costs more money than a life sentence.

Housing each inmate on death row costs the state $72,602 a year, compared with $40,121 for general population prisoners, the report said, citing state Department of Corrections calculations.

Eliminating the death penalty would save the state as much as $1.3 million per inmate over a lifetime, based on those corrections department numbers, the report said. The panel also said the Office of the Public Defender would save roughly $1.46 million if execution was outlawed.

The commission proposed that any money saved from abolishing the death penalty be used to aid the families of victims.

If the death penalty is abolished, New Jersey would become the 13th state without capital punishment and the first state to end the practice by passing a law. New Jersey was just the third state to impose a moratorium on the death penalty to study the issue.

The moratorium has held up the most notorious death penalty case in South Jersey. Leslie Nelson, a transsexual who gunned down two Camden County law enforcement officers in 1995, has had her death sentence overturned twice, the last time in 2002.

Nelson was to have a retrial on the penalty phase, but the judge delayed the proceedings last year after the moratorium was put in place. Camden County prosecutors said yesterday that they would continue to seek the death penalty against Nelson unless the law is abolished.

The only two other South Jersey death row inmates are Brian Wakefield, who was convicted in 2004 of killing an elderly Atlantic County couple, and Sean Padraic Kenney, who was convicted in 1996 of killing a gas station attendant in Deptford, Gloucester County.

Former State Sen. John Russo, a commission member who wrote the 1982 death penalty law still in effect, said the law might need to be abolished, considering the way it has been handled.

"But I believe that the fundamental problem is not the statute, but rather liberal judges and other individuals who have consistently disregarded the legislative will and refused to enforce the law as written," he wrote in a dissent to the commission report.

The commission *******d several lawyers and prosecutors, a police chief, a former state Supreme Court justice and people on both sides of the debate.

Some of the victims' families also said they did not want the death penalty abolished, including Gunnar Marsh, who son was killed by death row inmate Donald Loftin in 1992.

"It's all just one big sad story," he said. "They say closure and that kind of nonsense. That never really happens, but I think we'd be a little bit closer to closure if this guy had been executed."

New Jersey's Death Row

The nine inmates on New Jersey's death row, including the county in which they were convicted, their crime, the date they arrived on death row and, in some cases, the date they returned to death row after resentencing:

Marko Bey,Monmouth, Dec. 16, 1983, returned Sept. 13, 1990. Convicted of the murders of Cheryl Alston and Carol D. Peniston in April 1983. Death sentences were reversed on appeal, but he was resentenced to death in the Peniston case and that sentence was upheld by the state Supreme Court.

John Martini,Bergen, Dec. 13, 1990. Convicted of murdering Fair Lawn businessman Irving Flax on Jan. 23, 1989; he also has admitted to two murders in Arizona and faces a murder trial in Pennsylvania.

Donald Loftin, Mercer, Dec. 6, 1994. Convicted of the May 5, 1992 slaying of Gary Marsh of Trenton, an attendant at a Lawrence gas station.

Nathaniel Harvey, Middlesex, Oct. 17, 1986, returned Dec. 16, 1994. Convicted of the 1985 bludgeoning murder of Irene Schnaps in Plainsboro. He won a new trial; was convicted and sentenced again in 1994.

David Cooper, Monmouth, May 17, 1995. Convicted of kidnapping 6-year-old Latasha Goodman in Asbury Park, raping and strangling her July 18, 1993.

Ambrose Harris, Mercer, March 1, 1996. Convicted of murdering 22-year-old Kristin Huggins, an artist from Lower Makefield, Pa., on Dec. 17, 1992.

Sean Padraic Kenney, Gloucester, formerly known as Richard Feaster, March 27, 1996. He was convicted of the October 1993 shotgun slaying of Keith Donaghy, a Gloucester County gas station attendant.

Jesse Timmendequas,Mercer, May 14, 1997. Convicted of the murder of 7-year-old Megan Kanka of Hamilton, July 1994. The crime led to passage of Megan's Law, requiring certain released sex offenders to register with police.

Brian P. Wakefield, Atlantic, sentenced March 4. He pleaded guilty to the Jan. 18, 2001 slayings of Richard Hazard, 70, and Shirley Hazard, 65, in Pleasantville.

Yay for not following the will of the citizens! Huzzah!

They'll be sorry not to be with the other countries that have the death penalty and account for 94 percent of the deaths - Iran, Saudi Arabia and China. It's neat that the U. S. is in with this crowd on capital punishment.

NJ only had 9 inmates on death row? And they would save $1.3 million per inmate by abolishing the death penalty. Jeez, California has more than 600 death row inmates. The money CA would save would be pretty significant.

Prime example why a pure democracy is retarded.

Citizens want death penalty.
Death Penalty is bad.
Citizens are retarded.
Democracy is bad.

That whole thing falls apart because the second statement isn't true.

Hey! A report called it costly and pointless! That is good enough for me!
And you can separate my 4 lines into 2 "stanzas," the focus really being on the citizens are retarded argument. :)

There have been many studies and reports, which I don't exactly know completely off the top of my head so I can't reference them and look intelligent, that have shown that the Death Penalty has no impact on crime rate. Texas has one of the highest crime rates in the country, yet it also kills more people than any other state with the death penalty. It has also been shown that the death penalty is inherently flawed in that it almost always violates the 14th amendment, the number of blacks killed compared to whites is something like the number of blacks killed in Vietnam compared to the number of whites killed, insanely disproportionate. It is also extremely classist, as almost 80% of people executed had to use public defenders; if you are poor you will be executed but if you have money you won't be.

New Hampshire (my place of residence) has a death penalty on the books but hasn't executed someone since circa 1939. Our crime rate is one of the lowest in the country. We currently have a case going on right now, capital murder (the guy shot a cop in the face at point blank range) and the death penalty question is coming up a lot. The funny part is, a cop was killed here a couple years back by two suburban white kids, and there was never any talk about the death penalty. The guy who killed the cop now is black and from Boston. Funny how that works.

unfortunately:

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/arti...id=23&did=1266

i have good reason to want to support the death penalty based on personal experience, but i just can't. however, though this is two years old, i'm sure the numbers haven't changed much on support for the death penalty.

the death penalty is specifically mentioned by the founding fathers for the crim eof treason. it's part of our nation's history.

and here's what's hillarious: with every other too expensive, poorly run government system that i'm sure those congress people support, they want to "fix" and not "abolish". they;'re using fiscal shortcomings to push their agenda.

welfare is a financial drain on the state. fuck it, let's abolish that too.

While the fiscal angle is the one that's usually first brought up in intellectual talks, I'm fairly certain that the real reason that most people are opposed to the death penalty is because they don't believe that executing people is right. Show me some numbers and prove me otherwise, but everyone I've ever talked to about the death penalty thinks it's inhumane, archaic, and morally abhorrent. The money angle is just a supporting reason "It's wrong...and it costs more money!".

There's a huge difference between welfare and capital punishment in that abolishing the death penalty is the cheapest alternative that still serves the same purpose. If you abolish welfare we'll have millions of poor and homeless people. If you abolish the death penalty, the prisoners that were to be put to death will still be prisoners for life, they just won't be dead. It's a moral issue.

It should be abolished because it just doesn't work! It serves as no deterrent, states in the U.S with the death penalty have a higher murder rate than those without. It can never be done humanely and life imprisonment is a much worse punishment anyway in my opinion.

There was a study/poll that showed that criminals viewed life in prison with no parole has a harsher punishment than the death penalty. It was something I used in a paper for a Criminal Justice class back in undergrad - I'll see if I can find it.

I agree. Life in a jail cell is much worse than the death penalty. Think about it.

lol, i love the liberal college kid attitude of "all of my friends believe this so everyone must"
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/arti...id=23&did=1266

No, the problem is that the death penalty opponents have made the sentence too difficult to carry out. Look at Hussein, hung in 30 days. We need a brief appeals process here, and no electric chair. A bullet costs 22 cents.

14th Amendment of what? It doesn't violate the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, if that's what you're trying to imply.

Untrue. The Vietnam casualty rates were not insanely disproportionate to the population percentages of the races or to the percentages of each race that served in the war. But thats totally beside the point. Granted, in the case of the death penalty a much higher percentage of black people get executed than the the percentage of black people in the population...but still, more white people are executed every year than black people.

But these numbers don't mean anything anyway, unless we're willing to assume that black people and white people commit a similar amount of murders, which they don't. If you just want to play around with numbers, you can just as easily say that its disproportionate that black people have committed more than half the murders in this country over the past 30 years but that white people account for more than half of the executions. The fact that crime statistics vary among the races has nothing to do with the issue of whether or not the death penalty is fair in and of itself. A law doesn't violate the constitution just because it doesn't affect the population within the bounds of perfect demographics.

Hasn't there been like 13 innocent people executed in Florida alone?

I don't think its been proven that any innocent person has been executed anywhere in the US. There have been people sentenced to death who have later gotten off death row before their execution date (and a lot of those are not because the guy was innocent of the crime, but rather because of legal technicalities in the conviction/sentencing), and there are some cases where its at least questionable that they executed the right guy, but as far as I can tell there have never been any smoking gun cases of someone getting executed and then being proven factually innocent afterwards.

Do you not think the possible presence of doubt might suggest that people shouldn't be executed? Reasonable doubt is a requirement for conviction, but even then convictions are made while some doubt still exists. Couldn't that same line of reasoning then be applied to use of the death penalty?

lol, I was talking about the reasons why people who oppose the death penalty don't agree with capital punishment, not how many people oppose it. please read my posts before responding with your condescending assholery.

I'm aware that the number of crimes committed by whites and blacks is different, but even when this is taken into consideration it's disproportionate.

The main issue, however, isn't race, it's the amount of money that the accused (convicted if they're up for sentencing) has. The fact that we're willing to execute our poor, but not our wealthy is something I am ashamed of. The fact that many of our court appointed lawyers are unable to save people from the death penalty, and that private lawyers can, is something I am ashamed of. The fact that America is classist is something that I am ashamed of.

PS to Nate the Grate: I got Cam Neely's autograph. He's a really nice guy, damned good hockey player too. Too bad the Bruins seem to suck so much these days.

Aw, lucky you. They do suck, it's depressing. :(

Corganist and Nimrod's Son pretty much have no legs to stand on here. Their "just because" stance is their only real talking point. Death penalty has got to go.

Who gave a "just because" talking point?

My points were that the legislature is unending the will of the public, and that the problems with the system are mostly caused by those who don't believe in it and thus try to circumvent it

It wouldn't be the first time that legislation doesn't reflect the will of the public.

I missed this statement...but there's just so much wrong with this. Just how many wrongful deaths would be caused by an expediated death row process? And you're not seriously advocating that we shoot people execution style, are you? That's insane. We're talking about the United States judicial system, not the Italian mafia.

that's not even an argument though. that's just you trying to bait people into a retarded discussion. i'm not even going to put you on my plane of existence by addressing that "point." saying "because its our nation's history" is precisely a "just because" answer.