The challenge of killing the death penalty
How Appealing collects here the media coverage of an attempt by a state legislator to save the (moribund) death penalty in New Jersey. Here are details from this New York Times article:
The leading social conservative in the New Jersey State Senate, Gerald Cardinale, accused Democrats on Tuesday of trying to rush a bill repealing the death penalty through the Legislature without sufficient deliberation.
The Democrats, who control both the General Assembly and the Senate, have put the legislation on a fast track, and supporters and opponents alike say it has a good chance of passage before the new Legislature takes office in January. Passage by that group would not be as certain. If the bill becomes law, New Jersey will become the first state to outlaw capital punishment since the United States Supreme Court permitted executions to resume in 1976.
Seeking to counter some of the momentum that has been building for the proposal, Mr. Cardinale, of Bergen County, appeared at the state Capitol on Tuesday with Prof. Robert Blecker of New York Law School, a prominent death penalty supporter. “There’s no emergency here,” Professor Blecker said. “As everybody knows, New Jersey hasn’t executed anybody in decades.” The state’s last execution was in 1963.
Mr. Cardinale said the Democratic leadership in the Legislature was trying to bulldoze the opposition. “Ramming an issue of this magnitude through the Legislature during the lame-duck session is at the very least poor public policy and, quite frankly, offensive.” At one point during Mr. Cardinale’s remarks, the news conference veered into a sticky discussion of urban politics and race after he said that Democrats were taking advantage of their “uninformed” urban base by fast-tracking the bill.
Some related posts on New Jersey’s capital punishment debate: