OntheWilderSide

NEW YORKERS AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY
LONG ISLAND CHAPTER–GOOD NEWS!!!

Abolitionists:

We have good news for the beginning of the New Year! Front page NY Times news today!: THE NEW JERSEY DEATH PENALTY COMMISSION HAS RECOMMENDED THE ABOLITION OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT!!

Our statement on this wonderful development is below. Now is the PERFECT TIME to demand from our NY State Senators and Assemblypersons action towards ending the death penalty in New York! We can’t let New York drag behind New Jersey on this issue!!

Please consider meeting with your representative to voice your opinion on the death penalty. You can bring members of your social/political/faith group, it only would take an hour or so of your time. I can set up the meeting and give you all the details. Contact me,  ATALANTA26PT2@yahoo.com, to get involved.

If you can’t meet your rep., letters are needed! If you don’t know your representatives contact information, go to the Citizen Action Toolkit at:
http://capwiz.com/lwvny/state/main/?state=NY and go to “My Elected Officials.”

Enter your address, and you’re ready to write!

***PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU SEND LETTERS!!! WE NEED TO KNOW HOW MUCH POWER WE HAVE!!!!!*******

HAPPY NEW YEAR! ONWARD TO ABOLITION!
~COLLEEN

Statement by David Kaczynski, Executive Director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, on the Report by the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission Calling for the Abolition of the Death Penalty

The New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission’s recommendation that the death penalty be abolished and replaced with life without parole as the maximum sentence presents the latest evidence of why capital punishment is too flawed to fix.

“There is increasing evidence that the death penalty is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency,” the commissioners wrote in their report to the New Jersey State Legislature.

New Jersey’s commissioners found out what New York’s State Assembly did when assemblymembers undertook an exhaustive study of our state’s death penalty after New York’s 1995 death penalty law was declared unconstitutional.

As the New Jersey commissioners did, New York’s assemblymembers found the death penalty too flawed to fix — too costly to administer, too unfair to avoid bias in its application and too likely to result in an innocent person being put to.

 Notably, the report also highlights the negative impact that the death penalty has on victims’ families. More than a dozen victims’ families and advocates testified that the death penalty process compounded their pain by putting them through a long, extended process of trials, reversals, and retrials, and that life without parole would have been better.

New York assemblymembers decided against reinstating the death penalty after a ground-breaking series of five hearings at which a broad cross section of lawmakers, scholars, religious leaders, criminal justice professionals, activists, victims’ family members and ex-convicted
freed after post-convictions investigations established their
innocence.

Similarly, New Jersey’s commission held four months of public
hearings at which dozens of witnesses, including prosecutors,
corrections experts, judges, police, religious and community leaders,
exonerees, and average citizens testified. The vast majority called for
a swift end to the state’s decades-long death penalty experiment.

The New Jersey report is just the latest in a long list of evidence
that the death penalty is on its way out. Last month, executions were
halted by the Governor of Florida and by the courts in California and
Maryland. A recent report by the Death Penalty Information Center found
that death sentences dropped for the fifth straight year in 2006, and
public opinion now favors life without parole over the death penalty.

“The alternative of life imprisonment in a maximum security
institution without the possibility of parole would sufficiently ensure
public safety and address other legitimate social and penological
interests, including the interests of the families of murder victims,”
the report found.

We hope New Jersey lawmakers who will consider the report’s findings
come to the same conclusion as that reached by the New York State
Assembly.

We can live without the death penalty.

Filed under: Action Alert!, activism, Death Penalty, Electronic Voting Tagged: | book of the month, Uncategorized