How Not to Abolish the Death Penalty

By Jeralyn, Section Death Penalty
Posted on Sun Feb 04, 2007 at 07:27:30 PM EST
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Sentencing Law and Policy reports on New Jersey's proposed plan to abolish the death penalty.

When a state commission recommended last month that New Jersey abolish the death penalty in favor of life imprisonment without parole, some lawmakers called it the latest example of going soft on crime. But a Star-Ledger analysis of trials since August 1982, when capital punishment was reinstated, shows scores of murderers would have been punished more harshly under the life-without-parole bill proposed by the Death Penalty Study Commission.

Here's what's wrong with the bill:

The commission proposal would change that sentencing procedure in two ways. It would eliminate the threat of execution as well as any opportunity for a jury to exhibit mercy.

No longer would jurors decide whether a defendant deserves leniency because of age, prior clean record, charitable works, cooperation with police, mental defect, intoxication, upbringing or manipulation by others.

They would look only at the crime. If the jury found it fit any one of a dozen categories of "aggravated" murder, the judge would be required to impose a sentence of life imprisonment with no possibility of parole.

No mercy. No judicial discretion. Just LWOP.

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How Not to Abolish the Death Penalty | 5 comments (5 topical)

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hmmmmmmmmmmm (none / 0) (#1)
by cpinva on Sun Feb 04, 2007 at 11:12:12 PM EST

isn't the crime what should be looked at? once you eliminate execution (which i favor), the crime's the thing, not extraneous "mitigating" circumstances.

was it committed in the act of committing another crime? LWOP. was it an accident, that couldn't possibly have been forseen? not a crime. unfortunate, but not a crime. was it due to negligence, but not intentional? 25 years. etc, etc, etc.

bottom line: once you go to prison, your life is ruined anyway, regardless of how long the sentence. an accidental death isn't the same as murder, but someone is still dead.

Ludicrous (none / 0) (#2)
by HK on Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 04:11:24 AM EST

once you go to prison, your life is ruined anyway, regardless of how long the sentence

So it would make no difference to you if you were sentenced to a year or the rest of your life? Come on!

To say that prison ruins your life is to say that rehabilitation is not possible, that there is no hope for former inmates to ever have a positive role in society. If that were the case, every ex-inmate would either reoffend, commit suicide or live on the streets. This is simply not the case.

Mitigating circumstances are a valid consideration in sentencing. Every crime is different; blanket culpability cannot be realistically assigned. This proposal negates the role of the judge and reduces the justice system to simply a formula without the need for reason.

I can only assume that this was decided on so the people of New Jersey felt secure that their State was not going to be 'soft' on crime. Fairness is obviously expendable so long as you are still seen to be tough.

HK (none / 0) (#3)
by cpinva on Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 09:59:29 AM EST

if prison didn't ruin your life, there wouldn't be a 70% recidivism rate. clearly, there's a connection: most ex-cons can't get jobs, or an education, or anything else. so, they tend to resort to what they know, crime.

at present, rehabilitation isn't, for the most part, possible, because that isn't how our penal system operates. ex-cons will not, for the most part, ever positively contribute to society because, again, that isn't how the system works. if it did, there wouldn't be a 70% recidivism rate.

are you beginning to see a pattern here?

with respect to the issue at hand, the crime of murder, mitigating factors fail to mitigate one crucial aspect: the person is a murderer, they murdered someone. with the exception of a true accident, which couldn't have been reasonably forseen, everything else is just a different level of, well, murder.

how do you mitigate that?

Why (none / 0) (#4)
by sarcastic unnamed one on Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 12:55:44 PM EST

No longer would jurors decide whether a defendant deserves leniency because of [...] prior clean record...

do we see posters here railing against (in a fictitious example) "25 years for stealing a Hershey Bar" when, in fact, a bigger sentence was levied because of the criminal's prior convictions, yet, now, in this thread, if someone has had no priors, there should be leniency in their sentencing.

iow, if prior convictions should be ignored in sentencing, shouldn't any lack of priors also be ignored?

(For the record, I'm in favor of consistency in considering both a criminal's priors and/or lack thereof in sentencing)

And the Feds keep looking at how to kill more. (none / 0) (#5)
by Bill Arnett on Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 01:22:06 PM EST

I guess they figure that if the states won't kill who they want, they will do it themselves.