Signs of the Times on a Sunday Morning

I saw these in a some local papers as signs of the times and couldn't resist breaking my long hiatus here.

In Pennsylvania in an op-ed in Harrisburg's The Patriot News the Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marsico appears concerned about the new politics of the death:

The general public doesn't realize it, but the punishment in capital punishment is slowly eroding away in Pennsylvania. Adopting a quiet, more methodical approach, abolitionists and their allies are chipping away at the death penalty, and in the process, endangering the very existence of this ultimate form of accountability and deterrence to the worst kind of crime. [Of course Ed hasn't been reading the polling in Pennsylvania, he is on the wrong side on this one.]

From across the Delaware River, from the Morris County Daily Record, in an interview with the Morris County Prosecutor Robert Bianchi:

Q: The state Legislature may abolish the death penalty in New Jersey. Your thoughts?

A: The prosecutors' association (of New Jersey) has come out against the death penalty. I am in agreement. I have seen what it (the protracted legal battles) do to families. It sounds so much like a cliché, but it rips them apart. Obviously, it's not working.

Monday is the first of four key votes in New Jersey on whether the Garden State will repeal the death penalty.

In Arkansas a ballot initiative is being weighed for next year to establish a committee to study the death penalty if Gov. Mike Beebe does not establish a panel on his own. “If the governor is not will to appoint a study commission without some help, we are going to go out and get 100,000 signatures next year to show him there is a great deal of interest on all sides of the political spectrum,” David Rickard, president of the Arkansas Coalition for the Abolition of the Death Penalty, said Thursday.