December 16, 2005: though no New Jersey prisoner has been executed in more than 40 years and the state's death penalty remains on a court-ordered moratorium on technical grounds, the state Senate voted on December 15 to study the issue and delay any execution until 2007.
The bipartisan measure would create the Death Penalty Study Commission, which would study the economics and ethics of the death penalty in a report due by November 15, 2006, and enact a moratorium on executions until January 2007.
Critics said the measure is soft on crime and slants the study commission toward eliminating the death penalty.
"While I agree that this law needs some working, it needs working in a different direction," said Sen. Gerald Cardinale, R-Demarest. "It needs to go in a direction of resolution. It needs to go in a direction of seeking
out justice and not legal gamesmanship."
Cardinale said lawmakers should fix the death penalty by limiting appeals options and only administering it to those who are absolutely guilty.
But those who oppose capital punishment said there is no guarantee of not executing an innocent person and that the death penalty has been arbitrarily applied based on location, wealth and race.
Sen. Raymond Lesniak, D-Elizabeth, voted to reinstate the death penalty more than 20 years ago as an assemblyman.
"I made a mistake then," Lesniak said. "Thank God during that period of time we did not make a mistake and execute an innocent person."
The measure passed 30-6. New Jersey last executed a prisoner in 1963, and capital punishment has been put on hold in the state by court order since February 2004 until new execution rules are in place. John Martini, 75, who killed a Bergen County businessman, is closest to execution.

	Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi has been sentenced in absentia

December 18, 2005: Jordan's state security court handed al-Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his third death sentence in absentia for planning a failed suicide attack at the border post with Iraq. A three-man military court also handed Saudi-born Fahed Fuheiqi, 24, who was in police custody, a death sentence by hanging, while Jordanian Darar Abu Oudeh, who was a fugitive militant, was given a death sentence in absentia.
Fuheiqi, who entered Iraq from Syria in August 2004, was arrested in December 2004 after his four-wheel-drive car laden with explosives was stopped from driving into several Jordanian petrol tankers carrying fuel to US troops in the border area.
The three militants, including Zarqawi who was accused of masterminding the failed suicide bombing, were found guilty of "conspiring to undertake terror attacks", a charge that carried a death sentence.
Jordanian Zarqawi, whose real name was Ahmed Fadhil al-Khalayleh, had previously been sentenced to death by the state security court for the October 2002 murder of a US diplomat in Amman. Released from jail in 1999 as part of a general royal pardon by the Jordanian monarch, Zarqawi claimed the triple suicide bomb attacks on luxury Amman hotels on November 9 that killed 60 people.

December 18, 2005: an Iranian man was hanged in Tehran for killing his brother after an argument, the student ISNA news agency reported. The man, who was not named, was executed after his parents refused to forgive him. According to Islamic law, the parents could have spared him death but not a prison verdict.
Capital offences in Iran include murder, rape, armed robbery, apostasy, blasphemy, serious drug trafficking, repeated sodomy, adultery or prostitution, treason and espionage.
Islamic law allows the family of a victim to spare the life of the perpetrator. In most such cases, the condemned’s family must pay diyya, or blood money. Iranian laws dictate that a woman's "blood money" is half that of a man. If a man kills a woman, he will not be executed, even if convicted, unless the woman's family can pay half of his blood money in advance. On December 27, 2003, after a favourable verdict by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Expediency Council approved a Majlis bill on equal blood money for Muslim and non-Muslim Iranian nationals. Under the bill, proposed by Parliament in January 2003, the blood money for recognized religious minorities in Iran - Jews, Christian and Zoroastrians - has become equal to that of a Muslim Iranian national, which corresponds to 150 million rial (15.890 euro).