Kaczynski Hails Commission's Call for Abolition of Death Penalty in New Jersey

The New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission’s recommendation that the death penalty be abolished and replaced with life without parole as the maximum sentence presents the latest evidence of why capital punishment is too flawed to fix.

“There is increasing evidence that the death penalty is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency,” the commissioners wrote in their report to the New Jersey State Legislature.

New Jersey’s commissioners found out what New York’s State Assembly did when assemblymembers undertook an exhaustive study of our state’s death penalty after New York’s 1995 death penalty law was declared unconstitutional.

As the New Jersey commissioners did, New York’s assemblymembers found the death penalty too flawed to fix -- too costly to administer, too unfair to avoid bias in its application and too likely to result in an innocent person being put to death.

Notably, the report also highlights the negative impact that the death penalty has on victims‘ families. More than a dozen victims‘ families and advocates testified that the death penalty process compounded their pain by putting them through a long, extended process of trials, reversals, and retrials, and that life without parole would have been better.

New York assemblymembers decided against reinstating the death penalty after a ground-breaking series of five hearings at which a broad cross section of lawmakers, scholars, religious leaders, criminal justice professionals, activists, victims’ family members and ex-convicted freed after post-convictions investigations established their innocence.

Similarly, New Jersey’s commission held four months of public hearings at which dozens of witnesses, including prosecutors, corrections experts, judges, police, religious and community leaders, exonerees, and average citizens testified. The vast majority called for a swift end to the state’s decades-long death penalty experiment.

The New Jersey report is just the latest in a long list of evidence that the death penalty is on its way out. Last month, executions were halted by the Governor of Florida and by the courts in California and Maryland. A recent report by the Death Penalty Information Center found that death sentences dropped for the fifth straight year in 2006, and public opinion now favors life without parole over the death penalty.

“The alternative of life imprisonment in a maximum security institution without the possibility of parole would sufficiently ensure public safety and address other legitimate social and penological interests, including the interests of the families of murder victims,” the report found.

We hope New Jersey lawmakers who will consider the report’s findings come to the same conclusion as that reached by the New York State Assembly.

We can live without the death penalty.