The death penalty dies In New Mexico

NEW MEXICO last week became the 15th state without capital punishment. It happened not because of a judge's ruling or a botched execution, but because the legislature and the governor decided the death penalty is too costly, the chance for error too great, and executions don't deter crime.

Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat who previously supported capital punishment, said signing the bill was "the most difficult decision" of his political life but that "the potential for... execution of an innocent person stands as anathema to our very sensibilities as human beings."

He visited death row, saw the execution chamber and agreed with a majority of the state's lawmakers that life in a prison cell "may be worse than death."

Practically, the change won't make a difference in the statistics. Only one person has been executed in New Mexico since 1960, and the state's two death row inmates will remain there even after the law takes effect in July. But symbolically, the decision speaks to an awakening among the public that the penalty has been too often carried out on the wrong people.

Several states, including Montana, are considering legislation to abolish the death penalty. Meanwhile, Virginia is heading in the wrong direction. Lawmakers passed three bills this year to expand capital punishment. Gov. Tim Kaine, who has vetoed such expansion efforts before, has not acted on the legislation.

In the past 35 years, 130 people on death row in the United States have been exonerated - an average of five per year from 2000 to 2007. Some were because of prosecutorial misconduct. Rather than continuing to risk making mistakes that can never be corrected, New Mexico's lawmakers agreed to do away with capital punishment for premeditated murder and substitute life in prison without the possibility of parole. A statewide poll in 2008 indicated 64 percent of residents supported the change.

Last week's decision is remarkable for several reasons. It happened not in New England or on the Left Coast, but in the centrist to conservative Southwest. It happened, as it should have, as a result of examination and debate by the state's elected lawmakers. And it came about because of a growing realization in New Mexico that too much money was being wasted on death penalty cases that could be spent to help victims' families heal - and to prevent other crimes.

This page has long argued that capital punishment serves the basest instinct of society: retribution. As Albuquerque Sen. Gerald Ortiz put it, "We are the last Western society that holds onto it. It makes us less than we should be."

New Mexico - and New Jersey before it - show Virginia a better path, one that as Richardson said, will keep citizens safer. The guilty will never get out of prison. And the state won't kill someone who turns out to be innocent.