On death penalty, should Kansas follow New Jersey?

Lethal_injection New Jersey hasn’t executed anyone since 1963, though it reinstated the death penalty in 1982. That put it in a similar situation as Kansas, which has yet to use the death penalty it reinstated in 1994. Will Kansas join New Jersey in abolishing its unused death penalty? New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine signed the bill this week replacing it with a sentence of life without possibility of parole, saying, “There is little collective will or appetite for our community to enforce this law and therefore the law has little deterrence value – that is if you ever accepted that there was deterrent value.”
Each passing year makes the ineffective deterrence argument, along with the one about cost and fairness, ring truer in Kansas, especially with executions largely on hold nationally until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
Posted by Rhonda Holman