Tom Hester of AP has this story on the forthcoming vote to change New Jersey's abolition of capital punishment from de facto to de jure, and this one on the politics of saving the vote for the "lame duck" session. New Jersey is the opposition's exemplar of the war-of-attrition strategy. Compliant courts obstruct the death penalty and render it ineffective and expensive, so that people who would normally support it simply give up.

The story quotes Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts saying, "The New Jersey death penalty has become a paper deterrent, the epitome of false security." True, so why not fix it? When I testified to the New Jersey Commission last year, I was appalled at how little interest there was in fixing it. Only one member seemed interested in even considering that approach.

Certainly there is no point in maintaining the status quo in New Jersey. The choices are to mend it or end it. Mending it means fixing New Jersey's disgrace of a state supreme court, and that would require a constitutional amendment. I doubt the political will exists to do that. Does the New Jersey Legislature have the will to openly admit that the state chooses to sacrifice the lives of the innocent to save the guilty? We'll see.