New Jersey Repeals Death Penalty

Governor Jon Corzine on Monday signed legislation that eliminates capital punishment as a sentence in New Jesey and replaces it with life in prison without parole. At the same time, he commuted the death sentences of the eight men presently on death row at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.

The Governor announced:"These commutations, along with today’s bill signing, brings to a close in New Jersey the protracted moral and practical debate on the death penalty." 

New Jersey, which had not executed any prisoner in the 25 years since the death penalty was reinstated, thus becomes the first state to legislatively repeal the death penalty since 1965 and also the first since the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized capital punishment in 1976.

Pending before the United States Supreme Court is a case involving the issue of whether lethal injection as a means of execution is cruel and unusual punishment and, thus, unconstitutional.