The Appellate Division of New Jersey’s Superior Court ruled today that the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) must exam­ine its lethal injec­tion exe­cu­tion pro­ce­dures before it car­ries out any death sen­tences, there­by halt­ing exe­cu­tions in the state until such a review takes place. The rul­ing notes, “[B]ecause of the patent grav­i­ty of the life and death issues impli­cat­ed by the reg­u­la­tions, we have con­clud­ed that rather than sim­ply strik­ing down those reg­u­la­tions, DOC should have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to give them fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion, by addi­tion­al hear­ings if nec­es­sary, and to artic­u­late, if it is able to do so, a sup­port­ing basis for those deter­mi­na­tions. In the mean­time, how­ev­er, we are sat­is­fied that the reg­u­la­tions as a whole, as they now stand, may not be imple­ment­ed by the car­ry­ing out of a death sen­tence.” The rul­ing may also require the DOC to release addi­tion­al doc­u­ments regard­ing the state’s lethal injec­tion pro­ce­dures to New Jerseyans for a Death Penalty Moratorium, the non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion that filed the orig­i­nal chal­lenge to the DOC’s lethal injec­tion pro­ce­dures. Read the opin­ion (Feb. 20, 2004). See Methods of Execution.

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