Former mem­bers of the New Jersey Supreme Court recent­ly shared their insights on the death penal­ty at a sym­po­sium spon­sored by Seton Hall and Fordham law schools, and by the the New York City and New Jersey State Bar asso­ci­a­tions. Five for­mer mem­bers of the Court, includ­ing two chief jus­tices, reviewed the 25 years of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in New Jersey before 2007’s repeal of the death penal­ty. Their con­clu­sions echoed the opin­ion of Justice Barry Albin in State v. Wakefield (2007) that, com­pared to mur­der­ers serv­ing 30 years to life in prison, those slat­ed for death seemed to be the prod­uct of ​“ran­dom selec­tion.” Former Chief Justice Deborah Poritz (pic­tured) char­ac­ter­ized the efforts of the Court as ​“an extra­or­di­nary exper­i­ment in try­ing to under­stand the death penal­ty from both a soci­etal and an indi­vid­ual per­spec­tive.…” and that pro­por­tion­al­i­ty review became ​“the key to under­stand­ing how dif­fi­cult it was to make the death penal­ty work in any sen­si­ble way.” Through her work on pro­por­tion­al­i­ty reviews, study­ing the rea­sons behind the choice for death ver­sus impris­on­ment, she ​“began to feel…this sys­tem is…impossible. We real­ly can find no way to do this that will take the arbi­trari­ness out of the sys­tem,” she said.

In an edi­to­r­i­al on the sym­po­sium and New Jersey’s abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty, the New Jersey Lawyer, wrote:

The court passed every cap­i­tal con­vic­tion through the prism of reflec­tion, seek­ing to weed out the arbi­trari­ness that jus­tice abhors. When the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the peo­ple saw that enforce­ment of the death penal­ty could not be reli­ably rec­on­ciled with ratio­nal­i­ty in its appli­ca­tion, they act­ed, with the gov­er­nor’s assent, to repeal the death penal­ty. For that dynam­ic inter­ac­tion among courts, elec­torate and elect­ed offi­cials, we express our won­der and respect. And we are proud to hold up ​“Jersey jus­tice” as a mod­el for the world.

(​“Editorial: Reflections on the repeal of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment,” New Jersey Lawyer, May 19, 2008). See Arbitrariness and New Voices.

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