The tide is turning
New Jersey's move to abandon capital punishment is a defining moment in America's death penalty debate.
In American presidential elections it is said that as Ohio goes, so goes the nation. When it comes the prospect of ending the death penalty it may be that New Jersey, not Ohio, will prove to be the bellwether. On Tuesday, in a defining moment in America's national debate about state killing, its Death Penalty Study Commission recommended simply, directly, and unambiguously "that the death penalty be abolished and replaced with life without the possibility of parole".
If its recommendation is accepted and enacted into law - and initial reports suggest that the prospects are good - New Jersey will be the first state in three decades to abandon the death penalty.
Other states have imposed moratoria on executions and appointed study commissions to recommend reform of their death penalty rather than abolition. Court decisions in several places have suspended executions. Serious questions about lethal injection, long hailed as the most humane method of execution, have been raised recently in Maryland, North Carolina, and California, where federal judges consider the constitutionality of lethal injection and the procedures used to administer it. Missouri and South Dakota have delayed executions while lethal injection is reviewed. Oklahoma has altered its procedure so that the prisoner receives more anesthesia before being executed.
And, following the botched execution of Angel Diaz in Florida, that state's former Republican governor, Jeb Bush, ordered a halt to all executions, and convened a commission to review that state's lethal injection procedures, hoping to ensure that they do not result in cruelty and needless suffering in the future.
Gruesome stories of executions gone awry undermine public support for capital punishment. Support is also being eroded by dramatic exonerations of innocent persons falsely convicted and sentenced to death, and growing concerns about the fairness of the death penalty process. This change is reflected in the sharp decline in the number of people being sentenced to death in the United States, from 302 people in 1998 to only 125 in 2005. The number of executions has also fallen, from 98 in 1999 to 53 in 2006. Today, when asked to choose the appropriate punishment for murder, only about half the public opts for the death penalty, with the other half preferring life without parole.
In this time of uncertainty and change, the New Jersey Commission - composed of prosecutors, police chiefs, judges, surviving relatives of murder victims, and victim advocates as well as criminal defense lawyers and clergy - reached a series of sobering conclusions. It pointed out that there may not be "a significant difference in the crimes" of those who receive a death sentence and those who receive life in prison; that the supposed benefit of executing a small number of murderers is substantially outweighed by the risk of "making an irreversible mistake"; that life without parole is sufficient punishment to "ensure public safety and address other legitimate and penological interests, including the interests of the families of murder victims"; that the death penalty itself does not serve any legitimate penological purpose; and, most tellingly, that state killing is "inconsistent with evolving standards of decency."
The commission's conclusions make a powerful case against capital punishment and have special resonance today as Americans seek to rethink the nation's wisdom and morality. The nationwide abolition of the death penalty is still some way off, but events in New Jersey signal that the tide is turning. America's love affair with state-endorsed killing may finally be coming to an end.
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