Death Penalty Updates

Last week New Jersey continued setting about to abolish the death penalty – now only awaiting the governor’s signature in a couple of days.

According to the Toledo Blade , New Jersey reinstated the death penalty in 1982, six years after Gregg v. Georgia. New Jersey’s supreme court affirmed the constitutionality of the death sentence in 1987, but didn’t uphold it until 1992. That case was subsequently overturned in federal court in 2005, however, and the inmate re-sentenced to life in prison, being eligible for parole in 2014. There hasn’t been an execution in New Jersey since 1963, either.

New Jersey has been one of several states having the death penalty, but some sort of moratorium halting executions. The Appellate Division of New Jersey’s Superior Court ruled in 2004 that the state’s department of corrections had to examine its lethal injection procedure before carrying out further executions

The U.S. Supreme Court’s hearing of Baze v. Rees has executions halted in Kentucky and for all intents everywhere else as well.

In Ohio, Lorain County Common Pleas Court Judge James Burge has two capital cases on hold while he conducts hearings on the manner in which this state administers lethal injections (Here), and Southern Ohio’s District Court is still entertaining intervenor motions in Cooey v. Taft, now with twenty petitioners.

“New Jersey’s abolition vote,” a Reuters article this morning says, “could be a small step in the direction of an eventual nationwide ban. But with capital punishment still on the books in 36 states, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and broad political support for putting the worst offenders to death, the road to abolition will be long.”