Capital punishment in Singapore
In 2012, a couple of American elected officials and office-seekers have suggested that Singapore's success in combating drug abuse should be examined as a model for the United States. Michael Bloomberg, a former Mayor of New York City, said that the United States could learn a thing or two from nations like Singapore when it came to drug trafficking, noting that "executing a handful of people saves thousands and thousands of lives." The last execution in New York took place in 1963. Several courts have ruled that the death penalty violates the New York Constitution (see "People v. LaValle"). In 2007, the state of New York abolished the death penalty. 20 states, plus Washington D.C., have abolished the death penalty, with the most recent being Washington state in 2018. However, certain states, such as Texas, still have similar or even higher rates of execution than Singapore.
List of people executed in New Jersey
In 2006, New Jersey lawmakers drafted a moratorium on executions while a task force studied the fairness and cost of the death sentence. New Jersey had 10 people on Death Row at the time. On December 10, 2007, the New Jersey Senate passed bill to repeal the current death penalty statute, and replaced it with life imprisonment without parole. On Dec. 13, 2007, the state's General Assembly adopted the same law. Governor Corzine signed the bill into law on December 17, 2007.
A complete list of 15,269 executions in the United States prior to the reintroduction of capital punishment in the 1970s was compiled by M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla, and was made available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.