N.J. Legislators Vote To Abolish Death Penalty

TRENTON, N.J. — The New Jersey Assembly approved legislation yesterday to abolish the state's death penalty, making Governor Corzine's signature the only step left before the state becomes the first in four decades to ban executions.

Assembly members voted 44–36 to replace the death sentence with life in prison without parole. The state Senate approved the bill Monday.

Mr. Corzine, a Democrat, has said he will sign the bill within a week.

"We would be better served as a society by having a clear and certain outcome for individuals that carry out heinous crimes," Mr. Corzine said. "That's what I think we're doing, making certain that individuals would be imprisoned without any possibility of parole." Although New Jersey reinstated the death penalty in 1982 — six years after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to resume executions — no one has been executed in the Garden State since 1963.

The measure approved Thursday would spare eight men on the state's death row, including the life of the sex offender whose crimes sparked Megan's Law.

A special state commission found in January that the death penalty was a more expensive sentence than life in prison, hasn't deterred murder and risks killing an innocent person.

"We should take those who commit murder, take them to their jail cell, slam the door behind them, and throw away the key," Assemblyman Christopher Bateman, a Republican of Somerset, said.

To ensure the eight inmates sentenced to death would not be paroled, the bill gives them 60 days to decide whether to waive appeals and be sentenced to life in prison without parole. If such a motion isn't made within 60 days, the inmate would remain under the death sentence but would likely never be executed.

New Jersey has been barred from executing anyone under a 2004 court ruling that determined the state had to revise procedures on how the penalty would be imposed. It never did.

Among the death row inmates who would be spared is Jesse Timmendequas, a sex offender convicted of murdering 7-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994. That case sparked a Megan's Law, which requires law enforcement agencies to notify the public about convicted sex offenders living in their communities.

"She was 7-years-old," Richard Kanka said of his daughter. "She was abducted. She was raped. She was strangled. She was suffocated. She was raped post-mortem. Her body was dumped in a park so the perpetrator wouldn't get caught. Now if that doesn't constitute gross and heinous, I don't know what you people are thinking," he said.

Marilyn Flax, whose husband Irving was kidnapped and murdered in 1989 by death row inmate John Martini Sr. said she seethes at the thought Martini will remain alive "while my innocent, loving, adoring husband lies in a grave." "I feel the system has spit on me, has slapped me, and I am fuming," Ms. Flax said.

Republicans said that's why they would vote against the bill.

Assemblyman Richard Merkt, a Republican of Morris, said the bill was "a victory for murderers and rapists."

"It does not benefit families. It does not benefit New Jersey society. It does not benefit justice," he said.

Republicans sought to retain the death penalty for those who murder law enforcement officials, rape and murder children, and terrorists, but Democrats rejected the amendments.

Democrats control the state Legislature.