NJ to kill death penalty

PHILADELPHIA - New Jersey is preparing to scrap the death penalty next week, becoming the first state to legislatively abolish capital punishment since the Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976.

The death penalty has never made sense to me. It is not a deterrent. Killing someone decades after they commit a crime does not stop the crime from occurring in the first place. It survives as a placebo effect for society, “that bastard got what he deserved.” This puts us on dubious moral footing.

Not that Europe should be our moral compass, but they’ve found the American death penalty to be anachronistic - even repulsive in some quarters. I understand this sentiment. It seems that throughout all of human history - including recent history - our dark moments have always reveled in the execution. Why then, is a supposedly modern world which has shed its brutal past, do we still rely on the death penalty as a form of punishment?

It seems apparent that it’s not really working. Murder, coups, and riots all still occur. It’s hard to imagine the average death row inmate actually thinking about getting the death penalty while committing their crime. I believe we will find that once NJ bans its death penalty, its murder rates will remain about the same; thus proving how ineffective executions are as a deterrent.

Why then don’t we put ourselves on moral terra firma? If we agree that the death penalty has no impact on our crime rates, why don’t we ban it, across the board. Give them life in a cold, dark, and laborious prison. Killing people who killed people is cyclical after-all, let’s break the cycle.

I was with you until the last paragraph.

“Why don’t we ban it, across the board?” We don’t ban it because we have elections and federalism. This should be completely left up to the states. New Jersey is well within those rights to come to the decision they have. We would do well to have the death penalty discussed more openly in state legislatures and through citizen initiatives, but you do more harm than good when you let the Supreme Court or the Congress decide something for the rest of the country, without giving people a say.

Most of the opposition to abortion stems from the Roe v. Wade decision constitutionally mandating abortions. Doing the same for the death penalty may give us some fleeting sense of moral high ground but will alleviate none of the endless bickering we see in today’s politics.

Don’t hate the system. Arguments of constitutionality were made in Roe v. Wade. The state courts do not hear issues of federal constitutionality thus leaving cases involving them up to the federal courts.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the death penalty was banned nationwide through a Supreme Court decision on the basis of the 8th amendment i.e. ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’

I’d probably prepare myself for that if I were you.