New Jersey to Become First State in Four Decades to Abolish Death Penalty

For the first time in more than 40 years a US state is to abolish the death penalty.

A 44-36 vote in the New Jersey legislature to abolish executions in the state yesterday followed approval for the measure in the state senate on Monday.

The bill now goes to the desk of New Jersey governor, Jon Corzine, a Democrat who has spoken in favour of abolishing the death penalty. The measure will be replaced with a sentence of life without parole.

It comes as the debate over the application of the death penalty intensifies in the US. While 1,099 people have been executed since the supreme court reauthorized the death penalty in 1976, the rate of executions has slowed in recent years as concerns have been raised about whether the procedure most frequently used, lethal injection, violates the constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment".

Executions have been on hold across the US while the supreme court considers the issue. New Jersey will become the 14th state without a death penalty; 36 states and the federal government and the US military retain it.

In 1999, 98 people were executed in the US. By last year, that number had fallen to 53, the lowest since 1996. In 2006, the US ranked sixth in the world for executions behind China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan.

A New Jersey state commission found in January that the death penalty was expensive to administer, had no deterrent effect and carried the risk of killing an innocent person. It was, said the commission, "inconsistent with evolving standards of decency".

"We would be better served as a society by having a clear and certain outcome for individuals that carry out heinous crimes," Corzine said.

"That's what I think we're doing, making certain that individuals would be imprisoned without any possibility of parole."

No one has been executed in New Jersey since 1963. The state reinstated the measure in 1982, but since 2004 it has been barred from carrying out executions after a court ruling that it should review its procedures.

Eight men on death row will now be spared. Among them is Jesse Timmendequas, who was convicted of killing seven-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994. That case gave rise to Megan's law, which requires authorities to notify the public of sex offenders living in their communities.