Rethink the death penalty
EDITORIAL, The Star-Ledger from the Web, November 20, 2004
Newark, NJ -- Fewer people are being given the death penalty in the United States, according to the Justice Department, which says such sentences are at a 30-year low.
Last year, the number of people who were sentenced to die totaled 144.
While these numbers are heartening in that they reflect a decrease in executions, they ought to cause states to rethink the wisdom and fairness of the death penalty altogether.
There are 11 people on death row in New Jersey. What's remarkable about the list is those who are not on it.
Take the case of nurse Charles Cullen, who told authorities he was responsible for killing 40 vulnerable patients.
He negotiated a plea agreement in which he confessed to 13 murders but avoided the death penalty in exchange for identifying his victims.
Such deals are not unusual if killers, no matter how notorious, have bargaining chips.
Getting sentenced to death has become just what the U.S. Supreme Court, in its landmark 1972 Furman vs. Georgia ruling, said it should not be -- a punishment so "wantonly and so freakishly imposed" that it is like getting struck by lightning.
Since New Jersey reinstated the death penalty in 1982, some 63 death sentences have been imposed.
Forty-seven have been overturned. It has been 40 years since anyone has been executed in this state.
No one has been put to death under the law that has been in place for 22 years.
Last year, state Sen. Shirley Turner (D-Mercer) sponsored a bill that would create a commission to study whether the death penalty should be abolished.
It passed overwhelmingly with bipartisan support but was one of just three bills vetoed by former Gov. James E. McGreevey.
But this is not an issue that should go away. Whatever one's moral views on the death penalty, there are compelling reasons to consider getting rid of it.
Cost is one. It takes from $2.3 million to $3.2 million to bring a death prosecution in New Jersey.
Human error is another reason. In recent years, more than 100 death-row inmates nationwide have been exonerated, mostly using DNA evidence.
In New Jersey, courts have established such a rigorous system to ensure that innocent people are not executed that winning a capital conviction is extraordinarily difficult.
Some frustrated jurists, such as Superior Court Judge Bill Mathesius, a former Mercer County prosecutor and supporter of the death penalty, have suggested it is time to get rid of capital punishment.
Mathesius irritated the state Supreme Court when he wrote: "The death penalty process has devolved into a noirish Rube Goldberg contraption that seems to metastasize regularly with each novel ruling."
He ended with a call to annul the death penalty.
The question is whether anybody is willing to kill this badly broken system.
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