More states consider death penalty moratorium

The ongoing debate about the execution of Stan Tookie Williams is helping to focus attention on increased efforts to enact death penalty moratoriums in several states, including New Jersey.

California's State Assembly is scheduled to consider a bill on Jan. 10 that would keep the state from killing death row inmates until 2009. The state may have as many as five executions in 2006, beginning with the scheduled killing of 75-year-old Clarence Ray Allen on Jan. 17. Allen, who is diabetic and blind, was already serving a life sentence when he was convicted of ordering the 1980 killings of three people. He has petitioned Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for clemency.

Fox News notes that some staunch conservatives, such as Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) and the right-wing Alabama newspaper Birmingham News are rethinking their support for capital punishment. For Santorum, the issue is a matter of his Catholicism as well as the disquieting frequency with which new scientific techniques such as DNA analysis are identifying death-row inmates who have been wrongly convicted. The newspaper's change of heart came after it ran an investigation documenting inconsistencies in the way the punishment was meted out.

North Carolina's News and Observer is calling for a moratorium in that state as well.A task force there is considering the idea.. And in Texas, a former district attorney who had written about his staunch support for capital punishment is also expressing doubts, particularly in light of evidence that one man that he helped send to the death chamber waa probably innocent.

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