New Jersey state senator Ray Lesniak has introduced a bill to repeal the death penalty in the Garden State. If the bill passes, and Lesniak is confident it will, New Jersey would become the first state to abolish capital punishment since the Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976.
Governor Jon Corzine has promised to sign the bill into law and on its current timetable it would become law before the end of the year. Sen. Lesniak believes the bill "will pass by a slim margin in the Senate, and by a wider majority in the Assembly."
There is currently a virtual moratoreum on the use of capital punishment in the US since the Supreme Court decided to hear a challenge from two Kentucky death row inmates who say lethal injection violates the 8th Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. This virtual ban is based only on the technique since a thin majority of Americans still support the death penalty over life in prison without parole even though a larger majority (63% in a Gallup poll from 2006) believe an innocent person has been executed in the last 5 years and 64% in the same poll believes the death penalty is not a deterrent to the commitment of murder.
In 1972 the US Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, struck down the death penalty on the grounds that it violated the 8th Amendment's "cruel and unusual punishment" clause. 37 states enacted new death penalty statutes attempting to address the concerns of the Supreme Court and in 1977 Gary Gilmour was executed by a firing squad in Utah, ending the moratoreum. Since that time 1,097 executions have taken place in America with 939 of them in the southern states from Texas eastward. Five states, including New Jersey, have legalized but not used the death penalty since 1972.
This map shows the distribution of death penalty practice throughout the world:
http://i196.photobucket.com/...
As of 2006 the United States was 6th on the list of executions with 53. Sudan, Iraq and Pakistan were all ahead with 65, 65 and 82 respectively, Iran had 177 and China officially have 1,010 although there are estimates that the true figure is as high as 8,000.
I'm hopeful that bill will become law in New Jersey and may begin to get our legal system back on the path toward civilization, a path we've foresaken to our great shame.