Anticlimactic Punishment?

This story tells us that the State Supreme Court of New Jersey recently upheld the death sentence of Ambrose Harris, convicted of the rape and murder of Bucks County graphic artist Kristin Huggins in 1992 (Harris also killed fellow prison inmate Robert “Mudman” Simon, though a jury found in 2001 that Harris acted in self defense).

The larger issue, though, is that New Jersey is probably going to abolish the death penalty in that state shortly, meaning that Harris’s sentence would then be commuted to life without parole.

I posted about this here, and as I noted last May, there are plenty of valid reasons to do this, chief of which is that it would cancel the appeals process for criminals sentenced to death. Also, Harris is only one of eight inmates on that state’s death row anyway, and New Jersey hasn’t executed anyone since 1963.

But somehow, I just worry that there will be fallout for this that will hit the Dems chiefly (the NJ Repugs, as per usual, are already crying that the Dems are “rushing this through,” the state legislature; related bills, that is), though I definitely believe that this will NOT start a wave of states abolishing the death penalty. And I can’t imagine that the family and friends of the victims of those eight Garden State life forms are very happy about this.