By: Hank Kalet
The state Senate began considering legislation Thursday that could remove New Jersey from the long list of states with a death penalty on the books.
The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would repeal the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment in maximum security prisons without the possibility of parole. The bill also would re-sentence the state’s death-row inmates, imposing on them the new life sentence.
Judiciary Committee review was just the first step in what is likely to be a long and public discussion over the effectiveness, fairness and morality of state executions.
New Jersey is one of 38 states with a death penalty, though no one has been executed since it was re-established in 1982, the last one taking place in 1963.
There currently are nine men on death row in the state, none of whom are facing imminent execution. The state Supreme Court, in a 4-2 vote, on Monday upheld the conviction of 29-year-old Brian Wakefield, who was convicted of the 2001 home invasion and beating deaths of Richard and Shirley Hazard in Atlantic County.
The court ruled that the Wakefield’s trial and sentencing met all of the criteria under New Jersey law, that it was "fair, the death sentence was properly imposed, and his death sentence is not disproportionate."
Justice Virginia Long, in a dissent, offered a concise rebuke not only to the court’s immediate decision, but to the ethical underpinnings of the court’s willingness to continue endorsing the death penalty. She said the state court in the 1980s "relied on ‘evolving standards of decency’ to uphold that ultimate sanction" and that a "changing moral climate" required the state to reconsider its commitment to the death penalty.
Justice Long’s view of the death penalty is consistent with the recommendations made in a report issued by a state panel that had been charged with reviewing the state’s capital punishment statute. The key finding of the report, issued in January, was that the death penalty was "inconsistent with evolving standards of decency" in New Jersey and elsewhere in the country.
The report also found that there is no evidence that the death penalty acts as a deterrent or "rationally serves a legitimate penological intent"; that there remains too much risk that felons who commit similar crimes will face different sentences or that the innocent will be executed; that it is more expensive than life in prison without parole; and there are better alternatives, including life in prison without parole.
Unfortunately, the court may not have the authority to follow Justice Long’s lead Justice Roberto A. Rivera-Soto, writing for the majority, cited a 1992 constitutional amendment explicitly stating that the death penalty is not cruel or unusual punishment to explain why he believed the court did not have the constitutional authority to strike down the capital punishment statute.
But that does not mean the death penalty cannot be overturned by the state Legislature.
We are hopeful that the death penalty panel’s report will be enough to sway members of both houses of the state Legislature to endorse a death-penalty repeal and send it to the governor.
It is long past time that the state, to paraphrase former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, cease tinkering with the machinery of death.
