Corzine's patting own back over death penalty is horrible timing

It was 2007 when New Jersey abolished the death penalty. Child killer Jesse Timmendequas got to live. A lot of dangerous people who shattered a lot more lives got to live. Former Gov. Jon Corzine is quite proud of this.

If he wants to pat himself on the back in his Star Ledger guest column, that's his choice. But I have to tell you the timing couldn't be worse.

While the murder of a Robbinsville, NJ woman in South Carolina will be tried under that state's laws, the sentiment here is just all wrong. Just Tuesday night at a heart wrenching memorial vigil for Samantha Josephson her father called the man who stabbed her to death a monster. He's right. And monsters need to be put down. There were tears and heartbreak all around as friend after friend and even Sammy's own boyfriend got up to say a few words. She sounded like an absolute joy of a human being. Her life ended because of confusion over a car which turned out to not actually be her Uber ride. She was only 21 years old.

At Robbinsville vigil for student killed in S.C., father calls driver 'monster'

Reading about all the memories of Samantha Josephson then reading this self-aggrandizing pile of dung written by Corzine makes the former governor's words even more shallow. We have too many leaders in this country representing the wrong people. Our own Gov. Murphy is doing it with illegal immigrants. This former governor did it with killers.

Some of what he wrote...

By 2007, as governor of New Jersey, I was honored to promote and then sign our nation’s first bill to repeal the death penalty in the modern era of capital punishment. I will always be grateful to those who fought for that day, including the lead bill sponsors: Senators Christopher Bateman (R), Raymond Lesniak (D), and Robert Martin (R), and Assemblyman Wilfredo Caraballo (D). These public servants stood up for their ideals, and New Jersey is better for their leadership.
The night of the bill signing, the Coliseum in Rome was bathed in light to honor the step forward for our nation. The next day, editorials from red states and blue states alike proclaimed the act historic, and presciently predicted more states would follow.

You can see Corzine's full Star Ledger piece here.

Oh, good for you Jon, you made a pretty building light up. You can talk a big game about how the death penalty needs to be abolished across the U.S. and you can hide behind social justice and past convicted killers who were freed upon DNA evidence. The facts are we have an extremely long appeals process. Most of those exonerated men released from prison gained their eventual freedom due to that very process. And DNA evidence joined us in the middle of this dance. What I mean by this is from here on out, things like DNA evidence are part of the prosecution of new and future murders and are here on out expected by juries. Call it the CSI factor, it's a thing. So while he can say the death penalty process was broken because innocent men were freed, I would say that's proof that it's actually worked. And as criminal investigations have more advanced science behind them now far fewer mistakes like these will be made. So what do we do? He wants us to allow killers to live long healthy lives in facilities.

That's awful.

Back to the Samantha Josephson case. The man charged with her murder allegedly committed the crime in a death penalty state. That's good, since he who killed Sammy does not deserve to live. Yet when you know a few things about South Carolina you won't be too pleased. South Carolina has not executed anyone since 2011. That's because their Department of Corrections has been unable to purchase one of the drugs necessary to perform lethal injection. You see, no company in America makes the stuff, and the European companies that do refuse to sell it in America due to their own misguided opposition to the death penalty.

They're trying to fix that problem in South Carolina. A bill in their legislature would change the method of execution and force death row inmates to choose between firing squad and electrocution. That bill cleared the Senate but it's languishing in the Assembly. So even this son of a bitch might get to live.

I guess if he does, Jon Corzine will have to give himself an extra little back pat.

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