Posted at: 07/01/2009 8:36 AM
Updated at: 07/01/2009 1:41 PM
By: Kayla Anderson, Eyewitness News 4, and Reed Upton, KOB.com
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Death penalty abolished
Jurors statewide will no longer be asked to decide whether or not to impose the death penalty on a convicted person.
Instead, the harshest penalty they, or a judge, can impose is life in prison without the possibility of parole.
With the arrival of July 1, New Mexico’s death penalty has been repealed. The legislature eliminated it in January and Governor Bill Richardson signed the measure later.
The repeal, though, doesn’t mean the death penalty is history in the state. Two men – Timothy Allen of Bloomfield and Robert Fry of Farmington – currently sit on death row and the legislation that went into effect on the first of July doesn’t change that; they are still scheduled to be executed.
And people convicted of crimes committed prior to the first of July, 2009, still are liable to face the death penalty. Among the most well known candidate is Michael Astorga who is accused of shooting and killing a Bernalillo County deputy in March of 2006.
The last person executed by the state of New Mexico was Terry Clark who died following a lethal injection in November of 2001. Clark had been convicted of the rape and murder of nine-year-old Dena Lynn Gore of Artesia.
New Mexico becomes the 15th state to abolish the death penalty.
