Ending Capital Punishment----Close death row

Philadelphia Inquirer
Editorial
November 30, 2007

New Jersey leaders are poised to make history by becoming the first state
to eliminate the death penalty since the 1970s.

They should do it.

With staunch support from Gov. Corzine, Democratic legislators are pushing
for a vote in the coming weeks on a plan to replace the death penalty with
life in prison without parole.

The time is right. The cause, unquestionably, is just.

Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts Jr. (D., Camden) and Senate President
Richard J. Codey (D., Essex) should be celebrated nationally as
trailblazers if their reform succeeds. Their unease over capital
punishment is widely shared by millions of Americans.

There's the real fear that an innocent person might be executed, given
dozens of documented cases in which death-row inmates have been
exonerated. Before the availability of the DNA evidence crucial to many of
these reversals, it's anyone's guess how many death-row inmates failed to
prove legitimate pleas of innocence.

While government executions court the horror of killing an innocent
person, the system otherwise is unjust. Studies show that accused
murderers who are poor and black or brown face a far greater risk of being
sent to death row due to inadequate legal defenses.

The fact that states without capital punishment have fewer homicides also
calls into question whether executions have any deterrent effect.

Even if you accept a recent, hotly contested study that says capital
punishment deters other killers, there should be no dispute that the death
penalty wastes vast government resources.

Running prison death rows is hugely expensive, as is dealing with the many
legitimate death-penalty appeals. That time and public funds could be
devoted instead to crime prevention and compensating victims of crime.

The U.S. Supreme Court has helped set the stage for states to take the
step that New Jersey anticipates. The court's ban on the execution of
juveniles and the mentally ill acknowledged the growing global consensus
that such executions are wrong.

Now the high court effectively has halted all executions while it reviews
whether lethal injection represents cruel and unusual punishment
prohibited by the Constitution.

New Jersey might be positioned uniquely to scrap its death-penalty law. In
all but name, the state years ago abolished capital punishment: The last
execution was in 1963 and Jersey's death row population has dwindled to
just 8 inmates.

It's almost a formality for the state to shutter its death row.

Not only that, Trenton policymakers should be emboldened by a New Jersey
study commission's forceful call to end all executions. The panel's
near-unanimous recommendation in January to switch to life without parole
noted that executions go against "evolving standards of decency."

Pennsylvania's capital punishment system is fatally flawed as well.
Indeed, the American Bar Association recently gave Pennsylvania a dismal
rating due to injustices found in death penalty cases. So Harrisburg
lawmakers need to follow Trenton's in taking the same hard look at closing
down death row.

New Jersey lawmakers can strike the first blow for justice by outlawing
executions now.