New Jersey

A New Jersey U.S. dis­trict court judge has barred fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors from seek­ing the death penal­ty against Farad Roland, find­ing that Roland is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled and there­fore inel­i­gi­ble for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. After an eigh­teen-day evi­den­tiary hear­ing fea­tur­ing six­teen wit­ness­es, Judge Esther Salas ruled on December 18 that Roland — accused of five killings in con­nec­tion with a drug-traf­fick­ing gang — had ​“abun­dant­ly sat­is­fied his bur­den of prov­ing his intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty by a pre­pon­der­ance of the evi­dence.” In 2002 in Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court held that sub­ject­ing indi­vid­u­als with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty to…

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…

One of the prin­ci­pal caus­es of wrong­ful con­vic­tions in death penal­ty cas­es and oth­er felonies is mis­tak­en eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny. On July 19, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued instruc­tions designed to help jurors bet­ter eval­u­ate the reli­a­bil­i­ty of eye­wit­ness iden­ti­fi­ca­tions. A judge is now required to tell jurors before delib­er­a­tions begin that stress lev­els, dis­tance, or poor light­ing can affect an eyewitness’s abil­i­ty to make an accu­rate iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. The new instruc­tions also warn that fac­tors such as the time between the com­mis­sion of a crime and an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of a…

Four law enforce­ment offi­cials from var­i­ous coun­tries who came togeth­er in Washington, D.C., in 2010 for a ground­break­ing inter­na­tion­al dia­logue on the death penal­ty recent­ly pub­lished an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News regard­ing their dis­cus­sion. From their expe­ri­ence, they dis­count­ed the argu­ment that the death penal­ty deters poten­tial offenders.

New Jersey Abolishes the Death PenaltyOn December 17, 2007, Governor Jon Corzine signed a bill that abol­ish­es the death penal­ty in New Jersey and replaces it with a sen­tence of life with­out parole. On Sunday, December 16^th, Corzine com­mut­ed the sen­tences of the eight men on death row to life with­out the parole sen­tences. (“NJ Bans Death Penalty” Associated Press, December 17, 2007). The New Jersey Assembly approved this bill to replace the state’s death penal­ty with a sen­tence of life with­out parole by a vote of 44 – 36 on December…