Death Penalty Put to Death in Jersey
Calling hours are two to four PM and six to nine at the State Penitentiary on Saturday. Burial will be private at the Governors request. In lieu of flowers please send donations to the New Jersey Democrat Party.
Never having been a big fan of the death penalty I don’t think that I will attend the memorial service. In some respects it is a relief that New Jersey has abolished the death penalty. There are far to many chances that the wrong person can be put to death even with overwhelming evidence. One innocent prisoner executed is one to many. In the past I have had strong emotions regarding putting to death someone that has brutally harmed and killed a child, or killed anyone in a police uniform capacity. In hindsight I have seen that two wrongs will never make it right for the families left behind.
With the latest technology and DNA testing there have been far to many near misses when it comes to throwing the switch or injecting the lethal dose to end a convicted but innocent persons life. Over at MSNBC they have this to say about Jersey’s decision to end the death penalty…
N.J. Legislature votes to abolish death penalty
State is first to legislatively outlaw capital punishment MSNBC News ServicesTRENTON, N.J. - New Jersey Thursday became the first U.S. state to legislatively abolish the death penalty since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.
Lawmakers in the Democrat-controlled state Assembly voted 44-36 in favor of a bill to scrap the death penalty and substitute it with life in prison without the possibility of parole for those found guilty of the most serious crimes.The vote follows approval by the state Senate on Monday, leaving as the last step the signature of Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine, an opponent of capital punishment.
Snip a Noose…
A special state commission found in January that the death penalty was a more expensive sentence than life in prison, hasn’t deterred murder and risks killing an innocent person.
“It’s time New Jersey got out of the execution business,” Democratic Assemblyman Wilfredo Caraballo said. “Capital punishment is costly, discriminatory, immoral and barbaric. We’re a better state than one that puts people to death.”Among the death row inmates who would be spared is Jesse Timmendequas, a sex offender convicted of murdering 7-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994. That case sparked a Megan’s Law, which requires law enforcement agencies to notify the public about convicted sex offenders living in their communities. -MSNBC
If someone was found guilty with overwhelming evidence of harming one of my kids or God forbid killing one of them, I’m sure that my opinion as a father might be swayed momentarily as pro death penalty. For that matter I might even want to find my own vengeance and perform the task myself. In the long run I would prefer that the guilty serve hard time with a lifetime of thought on why they are serving that time. Always in the back of their mind why they are in prison. Not just sitting in some cell with cable television and a radio to be entertained with. That is no different than living in a hotel in a bad neighborhood. I’m sure the hotel room is cheaper by the day though.
Maybe the solution to the problem of crime in this nation is to stop building these glorified Club Med for gang members and start making crime a real punishable offense. Whatever happened to hard labor and taking ten ton boulders and making beach sand out of them? We don’t do that anymore because that is supposedly inhumane but isn’t that the reason why the prisoners are behind bars in the first place? What we need to do is stop baby sitting these animals of society that have been irrefutability convicted and make doing time for the crime a real sentence.
Might it be possible to build a national prison system where the scum of the earth that have killed children, police officers and IRS agents that cheated on their taxes serve time in a prison with the sole mission of breaking down the Rocky Mountains and moving the beach sand to the Grand Canyon as fill? How about instead of drilling for oil in Alaska we have them dig for oil and all the oil goes to the poor in America? Then again we run the risk of them tunneling to true freedom in China so that idea may not work out after all.
Until we as a society make the alternative of any crime committed against the innocent a real deterrent then gross negligent crime will continue. Till then we have the revolving door of the gang members equivalent of the Super 8. They get a roof over their head, clothing, three meals a day and all the free time in the world to plot out survival and retribution against the man.
Killing them is far to easy. Lethal injection is the most widely used option for the death sentence and falling asleep as if getting a tooth pulled and never waking up is just not punishment enough for my liking. Then again, the electric chair or the gas chamber is just brutality up there with the worse forms of torture. I’d prefer a life long sentence of hard realistic labor.
If I were a family member of someone murdered for any reason I simply would want to know that the guilty persons life is equal to the pain I would have in my heart for the rest of my life. The death penalty is a tough issue and both sides have legitimate logic behind the thought process. I’m erring on the side of caution when there is a remote possibility that the death of my innocent loved one is the result of proof proven false years down the road that put another innocent to death. I would not wish that on anyone’s conscience.
Papamoka
Originally posted at Papamoka Straight Talk…
December 14th, 2007 at 6:31 am
Amen to another state getting rid of the death penalty. As you noted, it is discriminatory and it doesn’t do the things usually cited as reasons for it, i.e. it doesn’t deter crime and it doesn’t save the state money. It is a barbaric exercise in vengeance.
I have to say, regarding making prison unpleasant, it is about as nasty as you are proposing and worse, as it is now. I have worked in a couple of prisons, and they are mean, dangerous, ugly places that twist the souls of everyone there including staff. Inmates are vulnerable to predation from gangs and staff, their food is sickening and shortens their lifespans, their medical care is inadequate to abusive, and the conditions in general are awful (for example, the facilities where I worked were kept at a temperature cold enough that staff typically wore jackets or coats all the time, and gloves and scarves on some days, but inmate uniforms were essentially pajamas. If they wanted to be warmer they had to buy sweatsuits from the only vendor provided, a monopoly that charged them twice the going price or more; considering that in their jobs in prison industries, someone who made a dollar an hour was at the top of the heap, a sweatsuit could cost two weeks pay.
They call it a correctional system, but it wasn’t doing anything to correct anyone’s character or behavior or equip them to do a better job of being citizens when they got out - and nearly all of them get out. It just left them traumatized, angry, and alienated, and then confronted them with a system after they got out that made it very hard to find housing or decent work.
Make no mistake, I am strongly for holding people accountable for their actions, and there are a lot of people who need to be locked up to protect the rest of us. As a therapist and a pragmatic person, though, I think we should separate the lost-cause sociopaths from the people we have a decent chance of salvaging, and with the latter we should work hard to turn them around. Usually that involves education to get a GED, vocational training, and counseling for addictions, earlier trauma, and other problems.
Even with the real predators, there can be turnarounds. In particular, I’ve seen quite a few people who were pushed into A.A. and required to participate for at least a year turn around and become ethical and responsible.
December 14th, 2007 at 6:43 am
Great points and commentary LJ!
December 14th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
wonder if its the season? a little hope and humanity for a change. Mat and LJ you guys rock.
December 14th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Hey, I am totally against the death penalty. Too many innocent minorities…er uh, minorities in general getting slaughtered by it. I also think of the OJ defense and how people can buy their way out with reasonable doubt. If justice is balanced, then if OJ gets free, many more who are innocent are being sent to their death.
December 16th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
NJ had no intention of ever using the death penalty. again.They haven’t since 1963.They just want everyone to say “Look what we did”
December 21st, 2007 at 8:10 am
As Johnny Cochran said (don’t know whether it was before or after he was on Simpson’s defense team), the color of justice is green.