State Legislature Likely to Ban the Death Penalty
New Jersey is buzzing this week about the state legislature’s vote on whether to ban capital punishment. The state Senate has already voted in favor of the ban; the Assembly and Gov. Corzine are expected to follow suit. They’re following a national trend: The U.S. Supreme Court, several state Supreme Courts and a few governors have suspended executions by lethal injection (or in some cases, all executions) pending the outcome of a case challenging the legality of lethal injections. In response, the Associated Press published an interesting article today breaking down changes our nation could expect if we had no death penalty, and arguments for and against it.
As we’ve said before on the New Jersey Criminal Defense Blog, we believe the legislature is right to end the death penalty. The Associated Press article notes that there are emotional and financial arguments around the death penalty. It’s undisputed that it costs more to kill a person than to incarcerate him or her for life; many studies also show that the penalty doesn’t deter future crimes. Furthermore, we believe the death penalty is a form of revenge that has no place in a civilized society. The United States is the only wealthy Western nation that continues to use it.
But as New Jersey criminal defense attorneys, we at Lependorf & Silverstein also see a practical argument: Not everyone who is charged with or convicted of a crime is guilty. Everyone makes mistakes, including law enforcement, prosecutors, judges and juries. Capital punishment makes those mistakes irreversible. The Innocence Project, a multistate effort to exonerate prisoners using DNA evidence, says 208 people have been exonerated with DNA since 1989. Fifteen of those were death row inmates who could have been put to death for crimes they didn’t commit. At Lependorf & Silverstein, we’re proud that our state has taken a leadership role in preventing more such tragedies.
