N.J. lawmakers vote to ban death penalty

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By TOM HESTER Jr., Associated Press Writer

Thu Dec 13

TRENTON, N.J. - New Jersey will become the first state in four decades to abolish the death penalty under a measure lawmakers approved Thursday and the governor intends to sign within days.
Assembly members voted 44-36 to replace the death sentence with life in prison without parole. The state Senate approved the bill Monday, and Gov. Jon S. Corzine, a Democrat, has said he will sign the bill within a week.

A special state commission found in January that the death penalty was a more expensive sentence than life in prison, hasn't deterred murder and risks killing an innocent person.

"We would be better served as a society by having a clear and certain outcome for individuals that carry out heinous crimes," Corzine said.

"That's what I think we're doing, making certain that individuals would be imprisoned without any possibility of parole."

The measure would spare eight men on the state's death row, including Jesse Timmendequas, a sex offender convicted of murdering 7-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994. That case sparked a Megan's Law, which requires law enforcement agencies to notify the public about convicted sex offenders living in their communities.

Marilyn Flax, whose husband Irving was kidnapped and murdered in 1989 by death row inmate John Martini Sr., said she seethes at the thought Martini will remain alive "while my innocent, loving, adoring husband lies in a grave."

"I feel the system has spit on me, has slapped me and I am fuming," Flax said.

Republicans said that's why they would vote against the bill.

Assemblyman Richard Merkt said the bill was "a victory for murderers and rapists."

"It does not benefit families. It does not benefit New Jersey society. It does not benefit justice," he said.

Senate Republicans had sought to retain the death penalty for those who murder law enforcement officials, rape and murder children, and terrorists, but the Senate rejected the idea.

Democrats control the Legislature.

Although New Jersey reinstated the death penalty in 1982, six years after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to resume executions, no one has been executed in the Garden State since 1963.

The last states to eliminate the death penalty were Iowa and West Virginia in 1965, according to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

New Jersey has been barred from executing anyone under a 2004 court ruling that determined the state had to revise procedures on how the penalty would be imposed; It never did.

Among those who have been executed in New Jersey are Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was executed in 1936 for the kidnapping and murder of aviator Charles Lindbergh's son.

The nation has executed 1,099 people since the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized the death penalty in 1976. In 1999, 98 people were executed, the most since 1976; last year 53 people were executed, the lowest since 1996.

Other states have considered abolishing the death penalty recently, but none has advanced as far as New Jersey. According to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, 37 states have the death penalty.

Bills to abolish the death penalty were recently approved by a Colorado House committee, the Montana Senate and the New Mexico House. But none of those bills has advanced.

The nation's last execution was Sept. 25 in Texas. Since then, executions have been delayed pending a U.S. Supreme Court decision on whether execution through lethal injection violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

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NEW YORK (AFP) - Anti-execution activists see New Jersey's new law rejecting capital punishment as a historic landmark in their fight to end the death penalty in the United States.

New Jersey became the first US state in four decades to vote to abolish the death penalty on Thursday when the Democratic-controlled state assembly passed the law by a vote of 44 to 36.
The state Senate had voted along the same lines Monday, and Jon Corzine, the Democratic governor of the northeastern state, has repeatedly expressed support for the measure and has vowed to sign it into law by January.

The Council of Europe welcomed the move as "courageous" in a statement. European Union members make rejecting execution a human rights condition of membership.

According to David Fathi, of Human Rights Watch, execution has not delivered.

"The experience has failed. The death penalty has not deterred crime," Fathi told AFP. "Even among Republicans, more and more know that it is not a solution."

The "death penalty divides the US from mature democracies, as France, Canada. The US stands alone among mature democracies, it stands along with Iran and China," he observed, predicting that "the time will come when the US finally joins the civilized world."

During Thursday's debate in the New Jersey Assembly Republican lawmaker Christopher Bateman said "We need to change the course on this important issue. New Jersey must be a leader."
But most Republicans still opposed the law, with some labeling it a gift to murderers and rapists.

The head of Amnesty International for the United States, Larry Cox, called New Jersey's move "a harbinger of things to come."

"Lawmakers across the country are realizing that capital punishment is permanently flawed, and the public is increasingly wary of a system that holds the very real possibility of executing the innocent," Cox said.

Although New Jersey has not executed anyone since 1963, it still has eight people on death row and came close to executing a prisoner two years ago, said Joshua Rubenstein, northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA.

It was one of the states that reinstalled the death penalty after the US Supreme Court overturned an earlier ban in 1976, but it has observed a freeze on executions since 2005 along with nearly two dozen other states.

Iowa and West Virginia were the last states to vote to abolish executions in 1965. Executions are currently legal in 37 states.
An opinion poll published this week showed New Jersey voters deeply divided on the issue, largely opposing lifting the death penalty outright and backing execution for the most violent murders.

But the study, by Quinnipiac University, also showed a majority preferred to see most murderers given life sentences without parole rather than being executed