Members of New Mexico’s House of Representatives have passed a bill to abol­ish the death penal­ty, mark­ing the first time that either cham­ber of the state’s leg­is­la­ture has passed such a mea­sure. Representative Gail Beam, who has spon­sored the abo­li­tion bill every two years since she was elect­ed in 1996, not­ed that the vote was ​“a his­toric oppor­tu­ni­ty for New Mexico to take a step that’s both thought­ful and prac­ti­cal and to join oth­er indus­tri­al­ized democ­ra­cies in replac­ing the death penal­ty with a sen­tence of life with­out parole.” Supporters of the mea­sure antic­i­pate a close vote in the Senate, where the bill must first be reviewed by the Senate Public Affairs Committee. Some Senators have called for pas­sage of the leg­is­la­tion due to con­cerns about inno­cence and the fact that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment fails to deter vio­lent crime. ​“Lately I’ve been look­ing at all these cas­es where peo­ple have been sen­tenced to death, and with DNA and oth­er things, they found out all these mis­takes. That does­n’t make any sense,” said Senator Phil Griego, a for­mer death penal­ty sup­port­er who has announced he will vote for the Senate ver­sion of Beam’s bill. The last time a death penal­ty bill reached the floor of either cham­ber was in 2001, when the Senate nar­row­ly defeat­ed an abo­li­tion bill by a vote of 21 to 20.

(The New Mexican, March 1, 2005). See Innocence. UPDATE: A sen­ate com­mit­tee has blocked con­sid­er­a­tion of the abo­li­tion bill, mak­ing pas­sage of the bill this year doubtful.

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