The state Legislature appears ready to do something it should have done a long time ago: abolish capital punishment.
Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts and Assembly Speaker Pro-Tempore Wilfredo Caraballo announced last week at a press conference featuring Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-death penalty activist, that they plan to schedule a vote in December on a bill that would remove the death penalty from the statute books.
The bill would abolish the death penalty and commute the sentences of the eight men on death row to life in prison without parole.
Speaker Roberts (D-Camden) said last week that bill A3716, sponsored by Mr. Caraballo (D-Essex) and several others, would go before the Assembly Judiciary Committee on Dec. 6 “so that it could be positioned for an Assembly floor vote on Dec. 13.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee already has approved the Senate version of the bill and sent it to the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee. A full Senate vote also is expected in December.
The bills are based on the recommendations of a state Death Penalty Study Commission, which found in January that there is no evidence that the death penalty “rationally serves a legitimate penological intent;” that it is more expensive than life in prison without parole; that there is too much risk of “disproportionality in capital sentencing” or executing someone falsely accused; that there are better alternatives, including life imprison without parole; and that the death penalty is “inconsistent with evolving standards of decency” in New Jersey and elsewhere in the country.
Public opinion remains mixed on the death penalty, though judging the various polls on the issue is difficult because polling results too often depend on how questions are framed — what alternatives are offered in the poll, for instance, or whether the question is tied to a hypothetical crime.
These conflicting results show that the majority of opinion, both for and against, remains soft and that a large percentage of people could be swayed in either direction on any given day.
That’s why it is important to look beyond the public opinion polls and gauge the changing landscape. As the report of the commission noted, courts and legislatures around the country have been carving out exemptions for certain groups, including bans on executing juveniles and the mentally retarded. Plus, there remains controversy over execution methods, especially the three-drug cocktail used in most lethal injections — a method used to obscure the hideous nature of what the state actually is doing.
And, as the report notes, there always will remain a question of moral proportion. Supporters argue that justice demands that a murderer be sent to death, that executions are a moral statement.
This argument falters, however, when you consider how often human error and bias come into play during all phases of the criminal justice system — from arrest through trial to sentencing. The chance that an innocent man or woman could be sent to death makes a mockery of the moral argument.
Most of the rest of the industrialized world has come to understand this. It is time for the United States to follow suit.
New Jersey should be a leader in this movement.
