[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, N.J.

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 12




USA:

see these videos:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4123767

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4123542

(source:  ABC News)




NEW JERSEY:

The difference


Lubbock County will soon be home to the 1st regional public defender
office in Texas. The office will be devoted to handling only West Texas
capital murder cases for those who cannot afford an attorney. This could
mean big savings for taxpayers and county budgets.

With a $2.5 million budget the West Texas Public Defender will handle
capital defense in 80 counties from the tip of the Panhandle, to Lubbock,
and on down to Midland/Odessa and San Angelo.

The difference could not be starker between New Jersey, where Gov. Jon
Corzine commuted to life without parole the sentences of the last eight on
death row after the legislature abolished the measure, and Texas, where
370 await execution. Texas paused only when the U.S. Supreme Court issued
a stay pending its ruling in the lethal injection challenge Baze v. Rees.

Of the 1,097 U.S. legal executions since the Supreme Court allowed
executions to resume in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), Texas, with a weak
defender system, has accounted for 405. Of the 42 executions in America in
2007, 26 were in Texas. In 2007, like every year since we restored the
death penalty in 1982, none was in New Jersey, where the state public
defender coordinated defenses statewide.

When we ask "what is the difference," two groups come to mind in addition
to our conscientious Supreme Court and its proportionality reviews, and
our legislators who moved beyond the simple retributive logic of a life
for a life. The Office of the Public Defender and the citizen organization
New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NJADP), led by
Celeste Fitzgerald stand out to explain how New Jersey has again led the
way - this time by abolishing the death penalty through the vote of our
elected representatives.

Our Supreme Court needed the adequately funded, dedicated lawyers of the
statewide Office of the Public Defender. Without the public defenders'
relentless advocacy for each of their clients, including those guilty of
heinous crimes, the high court could not have carried out its
conscientious constitutional and fairness-based analyses of every death
sentence. Were it not for the public defenders who blocked death sentences
in 80 % of the trials where it was sought, we would have had a death row
so crowded, and our Supreme Court's docket so huge, that the careful
review we came to expect could not have been delivered.

NJADP showed our legislators that for many bereaved family members closure
meant not the vengeance of execution, but confidence that the killing has
ended in life imprisonment without parole. Fitzgerald and NJADP united the
bereaved members of 46 families of murder victims to form New Jersey
Homicide Survivors for S-171. The bipartisan bill, now law, was aided by
the survivors' powerful public appeal to legislators:

We are family members and loved ones of murder victims. We desperately
miss the parents, children, siblings, and spouses we have lost. We live
with the pain and heartbreak of their absence every day and would do
anything to have them back. We have been touched by the criminal justice
system in ways we never imagined and would never wish on anyone. Our
experience compels us to speak out for change.

Though we share different perspectives on the death penalty, every one of
us agrees that New Jersey's capital punishment system doesn't work, and
that our state is better off without it.

To be meaningful, justice should be swift and sure. Life without parole,
which begins immediately, is both of these; the death penalty is neither.
Capital punishment drags victims' loved ones through an agonizing and
lengthy process, holding out the promise of one punishment in the
beginning and often resulting in a life sentence in the end anyway. A life
without parole sentence for killers right from the start would keep
society safe, hold killers responsible for their brutal and depraved acts,
and would start as soon as we left the courtroom instead of leaving us in
limbo.

Citizen campaigns like NJADP's have received international recognition for
such seminal work. In 1976 Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, a
Protestant and a Catholic, founders of the Northern Ireland Peace
Movement, shared the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1997 the prize went to the
International Campaign to Ban Landmines and its founder Jody Williams for
their work for the banning and clearing of anti-personnel mines. A day
after New Jersey acted, the U.N. General Assembly called for all nations
to enact a moratorium on executions with a view toward abolition. In Rome,
the ancient site of public executions, the Colosseum was illuminated each
night in tribute.

We see in NJADP, the Office of the Public Defender and their leaders the
caliber of effort, the quality of leadership exemplified by the Northern
Ireland peace and the international anti-personnel mine movements, and
action in the spirit of the U.N. General Assembly's worldwide call. We
hope the Oslo committee and other apostles of peace and human rights offer
the kind of homage we think our local heroes have earned - recognition as
Nobel Peace Prize winners whom others will be inspired to emulate. But the
finest tribute will be when other states follow our lead by their
legislative repeal of capital punishment.

(source: New Jersey Lawyer)