NJ in AI's 2008 Report

Here is a section of Amnesty International’s 2008 Annual Report I have been looking forward to reading! Congratulations and thanks to all those who helped out!

Larry Ladutke

On 17 December, New Jersey became the first US state since 1965 to abolish capital punishment. The following day, the UN General Assembly passed its landmark resolution calling for a global moratorium on executions. Sixty years after the right to life and the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment were written into the UDHR, and three decades after executions resumed in the USA, advocates of the death penalty are increasingly on the defensive across the world.

In the USA, the abolitionist cause looks far less bleak than it was even a decade ago. A number of factors have contributed to this trend, including the release of more than 100 people from death row since 1977 on grounds of innocence – three of them in 2007. The number of death sentences passed each year continues to decline from its peak in the mid-1990s. Just over 100 death sentences were believed to have been handed down in the USA during 2007. Yet from 1995 to 1999, on average 304 people were sent to US death rows annually.

The 42 executions in the USA during 2007 – while 42 too many – represented the lowest annual judicial death toll in the country since 1994. This was at least in part due to the moratorium on lethal injections since late September 2007 when the US Supreme Court agreed to consider a challenge to the constitutionality of that method of execution.