New Jersey

This month marks the one-year anniversary of New Jersey’s decision to end the death penalty. Legislators in other states considering repeal have been asking how New Jersey has fared. Did the sky fall? Did crime rise? Do prosecutors find it harder to get life sentences or guilty pleas without the threat of death to use as a billy club?

The answer is a resounding “no.” A recent investigation by the New Jersey Star-Ledger found that the prosecutors themselves are saying that those fears have simply not materialized.

Read this excellent opinion piece by Cara H. Drinan, assistant professor of law at the Catholic University of America in Washington. Excerpt:

"Georgia and the other states that are expeditiously trying to clear their death row calendars could learn a lot from the elected officials in New Jersey. Rather than acting in haste, lawmakers in these states should call for a moratorium on the death penalty so that its costs and benefits can be evaluated in a circumspect manner."

This editorial by David Kaczynski, Executive Director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, was originally published in the Schenectady Gazette.

Last year, we celebrated the fall of not one, but two death penalties – in New York and then in New Jersey. So after the victory parties, what next? Does abolition simply mean the absence of the death penalty?