Michael Paranzino [President, Throw Away The Key]: "North Dakota should bring back the death penalty, and it's sad that it took the brutal murder of a young woman, Dru Sjodin, by a convicted sex offender, to wake up the state's lawmakers. A federal jury in North Dakota has sentenced her killer to death under federal law, despite the state's not having a death penalty. This is an emerging trend in death penalty cases: even in states where lawmakers do not trust their citizens to make this decision in state cases, federal juries in capital cases who hear all the facts are willing to impose death sentences on brutal killers.

We already gave her killer, Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., too many chances. Less than six months after his release from prison, he raped and murdered Sjodin. Every day he sits in prison watching cable TV and eating ice cream is a further insult to Dru's memory. The system egregiously failed to protect Dru Sjodin. Executing this rapist-murderer will send a healthy signal to the next violent predator in North Dakota that the state is finally going to take murder seriously."