New Jersey Marks Tenth Anniversary of Abolition of Capital Punishment

On December 17, 2007, New Jersey abol­ished the death penal­ty. On the tenth anniver­sary of abo­li­tion, the edi­to­r­i­al board of the New Jersey Law Journal writes, ​“On the Death Penalty, New Jersey Got it Right.” The edi­to­r­i­al board wrote, ​“Abolition has proven its worth, in that there has been no surge of mur­ders, a sig­nif­i­cant decline of pros­e­cu­tion and appeal expens­es, and the elim­i­na­tion of unre­me­di­a­ble judi­cial mis­takes. [Abolition] was and remains both the right thing and the sen­si­ble thing to have done.” In August 1982, New Jersey reen­act­ed the death penal­ty, six years after the United State Supreme Court deci­sion in Gregg v. Georgia upheld the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of state cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment laws. However, no defen­dant was ever exe­cut­ed in the state. In January 2006, the state leg­is­la­ture passed a bill cre­at­ing the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission and impos­ing a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions until the com­mis­sion issued its report. The study commission’s report, released on January 2, 2007, rec­om­mend­ed abol­ish­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Among oth­er find­ings, the com­mis­sion deter­mined that the costs of impos­ing the death penal­ty were ​“greater than the costs of life in prison with­out parole” and that there was ​“no com­pelling evi­dence that the New Jersey death penal­ty serves a legit­i­mate peno­log­i­cal intent.” Less than a year lat­er, Governor Jon Corzine signed leg­is­la­tion abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty. Murders fell in New Jersey after the mora­to­ri­um and repeal bills became law, mark­ing the first time since 1999 that New Jersey expe­ri­enced a drop in mur­ders for two con­sec­u­tive years. One year after repeal, New Jersey pros­e­cu­tors report­ed that the abo­li­tion had not hin­dered pros­e­cu­tion of the state’s most vio­lent offend­ers. The Law Journal edi­to­r­i­al board said that, after a decade, the study commission’s assess­ment that the death penal­ty was not a deter­rent to mur­der ​“has proven its worth.” The mur­der rate in New Jersey has been low­er than it was in 2007 for eight of the past nine years and a 2017 DPIC study of mur­der rates over the last three decades found no dif­fer­ence in mur­der trends based upon whether a state had, or did not have, cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. A December 15 state­ment released by the Catholic Bishops of New Jersey hailed the state’s abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty ​“as a vic­to­ry for the dig­ni­ty of life.” The Bishops wrote that while they ​“affirm the state’s duty to pun­ish crim­i­nals, to pre­vent crime, and to assist vic­tims,” they also ​“rec­og­nize the need to improve our crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and to forge a greater soci­etal com­mit­ment to jus­tice.” Society, they said, ​“has effec­tive ways to pro­tect itself and to redress injus­tice with­out resort­ing to the use of the death penalty.”

“On the Death Penalty, New Jersey Got it Right,” New Jersey Law Journal, December 17, 2017; ​“Statement by NJ Catholic Bishops on 10^th anniver­sary of elim­i­na­tion of death penal­ty in NJ,” December 15, 2017. Read the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission’s final report here. See New Jersey.