The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area 73 As of June 2006, both South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry had signed into law legislation that allows the death penalty to be imposed for repeat child molesters. The law of South Carolina permits the death penalty as a form of punishment if the accused has twice been convicted of raping a child younger than 11 years old. Oklahoma law makes the death sentence a potential penalty for anyone convicted of a second or subsequent conviction of rape, sodomy, or lewd molestation involving a child under 14. Consequently, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Montana, Louisiana, and Florida are now the only states to allow the death penalty for certain sex crimes. However, since the US Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment 30 years ago, no one convicted of a sex offence alone has been executed. Moratorium There is no moratorium on executions in place at the federal level. At the state level, Illinois and New Jersey have instituted a moratorium on the use of the death penalty. In December 2005, the State Senate of New Jersey introduced a one-year moratorium on executions by the state. The measure was passed by the legislature on 10 January 2006, and was signed into law on 12 January 2006. New Jersey is the first state to impose a moratorium pertaining to the death penalty legislatively, rather than by executive order. The moratorium will remain in effect until 15 January 2007. The Commission was created to study all aspects of capital punishment in the state and to report on its findings and recommendations not later than 15 November 2006.180 In June 2004, New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, held that the central provision of the state’s law on capital punishment violated the state Constitution,181 and the state’s death penalty was overturned. Sustaining the court-ordered moratorium, in June 2006, members of the New York Assembly’s Codes Committee voted against a bill to reinstate the death penalty. In a December 2004 decision, the Kansas Supreme Court held that the state’s death penalty law was invalid under the federal Constitution, because it gave the prosecution an unfair advantage over defendants during the sentencing process. Therefore a court-ordered moratorium was imposed. On 26 June 2006, the US Supreme Court overturned that decision in Kansas v. Marsh, holding that Kansas’s death penalty law is in fact constitutional, thereby reinstating the death penalty in Kansas. 180 181 Death penalty news, Amnesty International, May 2006. The court found that the sentencing provisions were coercive because they required judges to tell juries in capital cases that, if they deadlocked and failed to reach a verdict during the sentencing phase of a trial, the judge would impose a more lenient sentence.