Some good news out of New Mexico:
SANTA FE, N.M. —
Gov. Bill Richardson has signed legislation to repeal New Mexico’s death penalty, calling it the “most difficult decision in my political life.”
The bill replaces lethal injection with a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“Faced with the reality that our system for imposing the death penalty can never be perfect, my conscience compels me to replace the death penalty with a solution that keeps society safe,” the Democratic governor said Wednesday at a news conference in the Capitol.
With a deadline of midnight, he said he made the decision in the late afternoon after going to the state penitentiary, where he saw the death chamber and visited the maximum security unit where those sentenced to life-without-parole could be housed.
“My conclusion was those cells are something that may be worse than death,” he said. “I believe this is a just punishment.”
New Mexico is now the second state to end the death penalty since the Supreme Court restored it in 1976.
Currently, 15 states do not have the death penalty.
Check out deathpenalty.org for information on recent legislative activity concerning the death penalty.
Baptist peace activist Michael Westmoreland-White has an interesting post on recent legislative efforts at his blog, Levellers.
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Most maximum security prisons appear to me to be a fate worse than death. It me such a prison would be the death penalty. I think I would prefer death by lethal injection to life in such a place. I have never seen the death penalty to be more than just punishment for a most heinous crime. It certainly doesn’t deter crime.
I have urged those who share my anti-death penalty views (this cause has been a passion of mine since my teens–long before I became a pacifist or conscientious objector) to contact Gov. Richardson and thank him.
Any kind of prison reform or related work by a U.S. politician takes political courage. So such courageous acts deserve our thanks and praise.
We are now struggling for a moratorium on executions and death sentences here in KY while a commission studies the death penalty and reports back to the legislature.
The NH House has just repealed the death penalty and the NH Senate is expected to follow suit. Gov. Lynch (D-NH) has promised to veto it–which is what happened when NH voted for repeal in the ’90s. It was vetoed by then-Gov. (now Sen.) Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH). NH remains opposed to the death penalty. Will the citizens push Gov. Lynch to sign, making NH the 3rd state (after NJ and NM) to abolish the death penalty since Gregg v. Georgia in 1976?
Is ‘09 the tipping year for dp abolition in the U.S.?
I am not an opponent of the death penalty. I believe that the New Testament explicitly acknowledges in (confers upon?) the magistrate the bearing of the sword as an agent of God’s vengeance. That said, I’m thankful for any government that does not bear the sword in a cavalier fashion, but that instead recognizes that the magistrate, too, will give an account to God for the discharge of this duty.
So, I am thankful for any level of severe circumspection that Gov. Richardson or anyone else in such a position of authority might undergo in the supervision of this difficult task. For New Mexico to undergo a time period without capital punishment and to seek a higher level of reliability in the state’s administration of justice could be a good thing.
Capital punishment is not gone away forever in New Mexico, nor anywhere. Unfortunately, if the state does not avenge criminal actions, people will either do so on their own or change the government. Government is our best defense against vigilanteism. When crime rates go up in New Mexico, and when administrations change, some form of capital punishment will return to the Land of Enchantment.