persons were sentenced to death in New Jersey. The State Supreme Court overturned 27 of these sentences. It was not until January 1991 that the Court upheld its first death sentence, in the case of Robert Marshall.





According to the proportionality reviews prepared by the AOC for the New Jersey Supreme Court over the past four years, on average 25 to 35 murder cases a year in New Jersey were eligible for the death penalty. In that time, just nine cases reached the penalty trial stage and one person received a death sentence.





CAPITAL COSTS





While more evidence was available to analyze costs incurred by the defense and the state Corrections Department, information on expenses for the other aspects of a capital case—courts and prosecution—is included in this report to theto testimony during that same hearing, it took five days to select a jury for the trial of Richard Biegenwald in the early 1980s, but three weeks in the Ramseur case. Potential jurors in the Ramseur case were questioned about their opinion on psychiatry, psychomotor seizures and epilepsy as part of jury selection.





More recently a newspaper story in Cumberland County suggested that it could take six to eight weeks to select a jury from a pool of 180 people for a crime committed in January 2002.14 “In Cumberland County, New Jersey, seven death penalty cases are pending. For the first of these seven trials, more than 180 people—three times the normal jury pool for a criminal trial—were called on August 15, 2005 to see if they could serve