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.

Help NJ take the lead against the death penalty!

For years, the abolition of capital punishment in the United States has been high on our list of priorities. Now, we have the chance to do so in our state and thus set a precedent for the rest of the country! As expected, the New Jersey State Legislature is going to vote on bills to abolish the death penalty in December. This vote comes as the culmination of years of activism that led to a moratorium on capital punishment and the creation of an official commission that recommended overturning the death penalty! Now that victory is within our reach, we need to remind our lawmakers to vote to end capital punishment. It would be a shame to lose this vote after so much dedicated action!

Please send letter letters to your representatives in the State Senate and the Assembly. You can find out who they are and how to contact them by clicking HERE. Short, handwritten letters would be great. The message is simple: As a resident of your district, I strongly urge you to sponsor and support S171/A795 to abolish capital punishment in New Jersey. You can also include reasons why you are against the death penalty, such as:

The New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission recommended replacing the death penalty with life without parole.
Capital punishment is not an effective deterrent.
Killing is wrong, whether it done by individuals or the state.
Wrongful executions can not be corrected, and we can never be one-hundred percent sure that a condemned prisoner is guilty because courts have convicted innocent people.
Revenge does not bring the victims of violent crime back.
Supposedly “humane” execution methods such as lethal injection can result in agonizing deaths.

Please also keep an eye out for media coverage of this issue and send in letters to newspapers supporting the abolition of capital punishment!