New Jersey, which has eight people on death row, will become the first US state in four decades to abolish the death penalty under a measure lawmakers approved and the governor intends to sign within days.
Assembly members voted on Thursday 44-36 to replace the death sentence with life in prison without parole. The state Senate approved the bill on Monday, and Governor Jon Corzine, a Democrat, has said he will sign the bill within a week.
A special state commission found in January that the death penalty was a more expensive sentence than life in prison, has not deterred murder and risks killing an innocent person.
"We would be better served as a society by having a clear and certain outcome for individuals that carry out heinous crimes," Corzine said.
The measure would spare eight men on the state's death row, including Jesse Timmendequas, a sex offender convicted of murdering seven-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994.
Marilyn Flax, whose husband Irving was kidnapped and murdered in 1989 by death row inmate John Martini, 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," Flax said.
Republicans said that is why they opposed the bill.
Assemblyman Richard Merkt 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.
Senate Republicans sought to retain the death penalty for those who murder law enforcement officials or rape and murder children, and for terrorists, but the Senate rejected the idea.
Democrats control the state Legislature.
Although New Jersey reinstated the death penalty in 1982, six years after the US Supreme Court allowed states to resume executions, no one has been executed in the Garden State since 1963.
The last states to eliminate the death penalty were Iowa and West Virginia in 1965, according to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
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.
The US has executed 1,099 people since the US Supreme Court reauthorized the death penalty in 1976.
Last year 53 people were executed, the lowest since 1996.
Other states have considered abolishing the death penalty recently, but none has advanced as far as New Jersey.
According to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, 37 states have the death penalty.
Bills to abolish the death penalty were recently approved by a Colorado House committee, the Montana Senate and the New Mexico House.
None of those bills has advanced, however.
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