On Tuesday, January 2, 2007, a special 13-member commission created in late 2005 by the New Jersey state legislature released a report in which it recommended that the death penalty be abolished in New Jersey and replaced by sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Like the commission, Thomas Jefferson had reservations about the use of capital punishment, and he believed it should only be used in a few cases. In general, he urged that the punishment should fit the crime. He wrote to Edmund Pendleton in 1776:
“Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime. Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason, [but I] would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature. Rape, buggery, etc., punish by castration. All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offence. . . . Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge or of the executive power will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing man.”
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