Michael Deibert

NEW YORK, Dec 6 2006 (IPS) — When Lorry Post’s daughter was murdered in 1989, Post did not want to see his daughter’s murderer executed, but to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

“Lisa loved people, she couldn’t stand to see anyone get hurt, so that would be the last thing she would want,” Post told IPS.

A founder of New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NJADP), Post was of one of 70 people who spoke in recent months before a blue ribbon commission charged with studying whether capital punishment should be allowed in the northeastern state of New Jersey.

“I was always against the death penalty,” says Post, one of the founders of NJADP.

The New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission, created in January by the state legislature, held five public meetings between July and October in the state’s capital, Trenton.

It heard testimony from people from both sides of the capital punishment debate. Speakers ranged from opponents like Post to those who are committed to keeping executions in the state as a means to punish the guilty.

The commission’s report was due in November, but its release was postponed until sometime in the next few weeks, and observers say the panel is likely to recommend abolishing or at least instituting a moratorium on the deadly practise.

Earlier this year, the state’s senate placed a one-year moratorium on executions, making New Jersey the first state to enact a legislative moratorium on the death penalty. Other states, notably Illinois, have abolished capital punishment through executive order.

New Jersey’s Governor Jon Corzine, a Democrat, is a vigorous opponent of capital punishment. When he was serving as a U.S. senator, Corzine co-authored a 2002 opinion piece with Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold calling for a halt to executions nationwide. The last time New Jersey executed someone was in 1963.

Chairing the 13-member committee is the former president of New York Theological Seminary, Rev. M. William Howard, Jr. Other members include local personalities as diverse as chief of police James P. Abbott and crime victims’ advocate Kathleen M. Garcia.

The commission heard from former death row inmates who had been wrongfully convicted and listened to hair-raising tales, such as the 1997 Florida execution of Pedro Medina, a Cuban. The electric chair used to kill Medina, nicknamed Old Sparky, caused flames to shoot out of Medina’s head.

Post and his wife gathered signatures from 31 relatives of murder victims who want an end to the death penalty. Post presented the letter to the commission.

“The death penalty has been an abysmal failure,” Celeste Fitzgerald, NJADP’s executive director, told IPS. “We’ve learned that the long (legal) process is harmful to murder victim’s families, that it risks executing innocent persons, that it takes resources away from other critical needs from the state and that, overall, the death penalty is a distraction from justice.”

The commission also heard from capital punishment proponents such as Sharon Hazard-Johnson, whose elderly parents were murdered by an intruder.

“I do think for the most heinous murders, the death penalty is the only punishment that is consistent with justice. Any less punishment is a travesty,” John C. McAdams, a political science professor at Wisconsin’s Marquette University and a death penalty supporter, told IPS. McAdams did not testify before the commission.

“We should risk erring in the direction of executing heinous murderers for no deterrent effect rather than failing to execute heinous murderers when to do so would cost innocent lives,” he added.

As the commission found out, few issues in the United States generate such strong emotions as the death penalty. It is a topic which cuts across party, gender and religious lines.

Capital punishment is sanctioned by 38 of the 50 states in the union, though practiced by only a few. It is additionally reserved as a punishment by the federal government and the U.S. military.

In January 2003, then-Illinois governor George H. Ryan, a Republican, who had previously ordered a moratorium on executions in the state, commuted all of the state’s death penalties. In contrast, in his five years as governor of Texas, U.S. President George W. Bush, also a Republican, oversaw the executions of 131 prisoners – many more than in any other state.

The death penalty was declared unconstitutional in New York in 2004 by that state’s court of appeals. In several states, “Innocence Projects” – groups that work to exonerate the wrongfully convicted through post-conviction DNA testing – have exonerated some 187 people who had been convicted for crimes they did not commit. Not all of those freed had been on death row.

However, in a referendum that coincided with the Nov. 7 legislative elections, more than 55 percent of Wisconsin voters backed reinstating the death penalty in cases where first-degree multiple intentional homicide has been committed and for which there is DNA evidence. The vote was non-binding.

Furthermore, state legislatures in a handful of the southern U.S. states are considering adding laws that would make some sex crimes against juveniles eligible for the death penalty.

New Jersey voted to reintroduce capital punishment in 1982, though it has not executed anyone since Ralph J. Hudson was electrocuted in 1963 for having stabbed his estranged wife to death as she waited tables in Atlantic City.

Among those who previously paid the ultimate price in New Jersey’s justice system were the murderous bigamist Henry Colin Campbell, in 1930, and Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German migrant carpenter and one-time criminal who was electrocuted for allegedly abducting and killing the 20-month-old son of renowned pilot Charles Lindbergh.

Serious questions about Hauptmann’s culpability arose years later. It is just this imperfection, capital punishment opponents say, of which they have tried to convince the commission.