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.”
The problem of course is that there really isn’t such a thing as “Life without Parole” because the sentence can always be commuted. It becomes a clever game of “bait and switch”. Those who today loudly work to substitute life without parole for death will quietly work tomorrow to commute the sentence. For they believe that both sentences contain the same basic seed of evil – punishment without hope.
I could live without the death penalty. I simply require an equivalent punishment that with certainty inflicts punishment without hope; the painful relentless grind of a joyless life devoid of comfort, amusement, and pleasure, and the certain knowledge that it will continue until death. Anything less devalues the the life of the victim of the crime. For the dead have none of these things. So if not death then as punishment the murderer must suffer living death.
Do we have the fortitude to do this? Too many think people go to prison as punishment. In fact people go to prison for punishment. The man who otherwise would be put to death should have no books, no TV, no paper, no variety of food. No holidays, no games, no visitors, no contacts. Only hard painful labor, and a dark cell until the day he dies. For the dead have none of these good things, but only darkness. Do we have the will to do this? If not, we really haven’t found an adequate substitute for death.
carl
The death penalty is more expensive only because of the proliferation of theoretical and procedural “rights” advanced by the elite lawyer class. The other externality is government funding of criminal defense.
Carl,
You won’t get that alternative, and although I am a death penalty supporter, I don’t think you should. If you’re going to let a man keep breathing, you ought to let him become better while he does.
Also, we’re Christians here, so the dead don’t just have darkness.
Ed
The question in play is whether Life without Parole is an adequate substitute for death. An unwillingness to inpose the harsh conditions I described (and the reality I would hypotheically envision is much harsher than I described) manifestly proves that it is not. Life without parole is a much lighter punishment – as evidenced by the fact that convicts overwhelmingly prefer it to death. Let’s not kid ourselves. Opposition to the death penalty is rooted in a desire to not punish so harshly – to allow the criminal some vision of hope in temporal life.
The dead from the perspective of this world have only darkness. They have been cut off from the temporal world – cut off from those living in it, and from those good things that may be enjoyed. For this the murderer is punished. It is true that men have an eternal destiny. But that does not mitigate the impact of murder on this world. We do not say “The victim was a Christian, so he is better off. His murderer did him a favor in fact. Why then punish him.”
carl
I would not want a person guilty of the horrible crime of murder without mercy to ever walk anywhere as a free person!! Nuff said
Another footnote to the previous comment. Jesus on the cross dying granted mercy and forgiveness of the penitent criminal. But note the criminal still had to accept punishment for his crime.