New Jersey State Prison

Famous Executions

Salvatorre Merra was put to death by electric chair on August 5 1927 for murdering, with the help of his nephew Salvatore Ranelli, paymaster Thomas Conway in a car barn in Newark. Hoping to interrupt the execution process with the help of his lawyer, Merra denied his convictions to the bitter end, claiming he was always innocent. His argument in the case was that the jury had separated the verdict of both Merra and Ranelli with a comma instead of a semicolon, meaning that they both should have received the same sentence instead of Ranelli serving life and Merra serving execution (NYT August 6 1927).

Facts

March 2006

A scathing Star-Ledger report that came out in March of 2006 revealed a thread of corruption running through a select number of prison guards at New Jersey prisons. The first case of 2005 occurred when a guard passed a straight razor into the inmate population at New Jersey State Prison. Several others occurred throughout the year: one guard left the main gate wide open at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, while another punched an inmate. Some assaulted prisoners, allowed inmates to attack each other and released them from custody without proper authorization, according to the Star-Ledger's report. In 2005 alone, the New Jersey Department of Corrections fired 35 correctional workers.

On an unrelated topic, former New Jersey corrections commissioner Devon Brown started up a chess club for prisoners at New Jersey State Prison early in the prison's history, claiming that the downfall of many inmates remains their impulsivity, and their here-and-now state of thinking that prevents them from clearly analyzing the consequences of their actions.