New Jersey does it right

The New York Times reports here that "[t]he New Jersey Senate voted Monday to make the state the first in the country to repeal the death penalty since the United States Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976 and established the nation’s current system of capital punishment."  The Assembly is expected to follow suit.  Here's more from the piece:

For those opposed to capital punishment, New Jersey’s repeal would represent a victory that has so far eluded them in the modern history of the death penalty.

Though legislatures across the country have tried to abolish capital punishment since 1976, none have succeeded. This year alone, the legislatures in Nebraska, Montana, Maryland and New Mexico have debated bills to repeal their death penalties, but each of those measures failed, often by a slim margin.

So far, opponents of the death penalty have succeeded only through court rulings, like a decision declaring New York’s capital punishment statute unconstitutional, or through moratoriums imposed by a governor, like in Illinois and Maryland.

“What New Jersey is going to do is have a Legislature-initiated repeal, and that’s different,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been critical of American capital sentence laws. “This is a degree of legislative action in the undoing of the death penalty which is a fairly significant step forward.”

This (and not through decisions by federal courts) is, in my view, how abolition should happen.  More like this, please.