Videos from New Jersey

NCADP's Abolish the Death Penalty blog has some good reflections on the victory in New Jersey and (scroll down to the December 14th post) a wonderful quick video clip from Abe Bonowitz showing the moment of the vote.

The blogger "BlueJersey" has a video of the press conference just after the vote here.

At that press conference, Celeste Fitzgerald of New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and Shari Silberstein of Equal Justice USA, two people who have worked very hard for a long time to achieve this victory, offer some remarks that put the New Jersey victory in a broader national context. Senator-elect Kip Bateman, a Republican co-spnosor of the bill, says, "We couldn't have done it without the victims' families coming forward and really just spilling out their hearts to legislators and to members of the [study] commission."

And Eddie Hicks of NJADP, father of a murder victim, who served on the death penalty study commission, says, "I used to hear so many people, particularly after my daughter died, saying, obviously you're for the death penalty because you lost your daughter. And that wasn't true. I found there were a lot of other people out there who felt the same as I do. So I got involved in this effort because I felt it was really necessary to realize that, yeah, there are family members who are in favor of the death penalty, but there are very many of them out there who feel the way I do, for many different reasons -- some morally, some for more practical reasons."