THE SENTENCING
New Jersey’s sentencing law for first-degree murder in 1990 provided for life in prison. The sentence imposed on John List was five consecutive life terms — one for each victim.
The practical effect of consecutive life terms, rather than concurrent terms, is that parole eligibility is calculated from the end of the last sentence, not from the date of the first. Five consecutive life sentences meant parole eligibility after approximately 125 years — a legal way of saying that this defendant would never be eligible for parole.
He was sixty-four years old when sentenced. He died at eighty-two. He served the sentence until he died.
New Jersey’s history with capital punishment is complicated. The state abolished the death penalty in 1972 — the year after the List murders occurred. The crimes themselves were committed in 1971 when capital punishment was theoretically available under New Jersey law. Whether List could have faced capital prosecution for crimes committed when the law allowed it, but tried after abolition, was a question that the legal process eventually resolved in favor of the life sentence as the available penalty.
The legal details of how that question was resolved are part of the case record. For the purposes of the outcome: he was sentenced to five consecutive life terms, he served those terms until his death in 2008, and he died in prison.
The five victims of the killings had not been similarly given the option of dying at eighty-two.