Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: Is New York a death penalty state?
While laws regarding the imposition of capital punishment in the State of New York are still on the books, it is no longer enforced as it is been declared unconstitutional in the state and this ruling has not been overturned. The last execution took place in 1963, when Eddie Mays was electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison. The state was the first to adopt the electric chair as a method of execution, which replaced hanging. Following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling declaring existing capital punishment statutes unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia (1972), New York was without a death penalty until 1995, when then-Governor George Pataki signed a new statute into law, which provided for execution by lethal injection.
After the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision in "Furman v. Georgia" effectively overturned existing state laws for capital punishment in the United States, Florida was the first state to enact a new death penalty statute, which Governor Askew signed. But, Askew personally believed that the death penalty was appropriate only in rare cases. Afterward the Supreme Court accepted new state death-penalty laws in "Gregg v. Georgia". Immediately after the ruling, which effectively reinstated the use of the death penalty in the United States, Governor Askew began signing death warrants. Executions were not resumed until the administration of his successor, Bob Graham.
Cuomo was notable for his liberal political views, particularly his steadfast opposition to the death penalty, an opinion that was unpopular in New York during the high-crime era of the 1980s and early 1990s. While governor, he vetoed several bills that would have re-established capital punishment in New York State. The death penalty was reinstated by Governor Pataki the year after he defeated Cuomo in the 1994 election, although it was never put into effect and the statute was declared unconstitutional by the New York Court of Appeals in 2004.
Shulman was sentenced to death in 1999 for the only murder he committed after New York State reinstated the death penalty in 1995. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for his other murders because New York's death penalty law was not in effect at the time he committed them. His sentence was reduced to life in prison after the New York State Court of Appeals invalidated the death penalty in 2004.
Bruno, along with Governor George Pataki and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, was instrumental in returning the death penalty to New York State in 1995. The New York Court of Appeals (the highest state court in New York) later found the law to be unconstitutional because it gave jurors deadlocked between life without parole and execution no choice but to give eligibility for parole after 25 years; the Court of Appeals feared that jurors faced with this choice would unfairly lean toward a death sentence. In the 10 years after the law was passed, New York's crime rate plummeted without ever seeing an execution, perhaps weakening public support for the death penalty. Silver let the law die in 2005 without much debate.
Barkett's nomination was hotly contested by newspaper columnists and such conservative politicians as Orrin Hatch, who was, at the time, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. As described in the New York Times, the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones, and a 2015 book, The Biblical Truth About America's Death Penalty, much of the focus was on Barkett's supposedly being soft on crime. The opposition focused on her being against the death penalty, though she had affirmed the death penalty 275 times while on the state supreme court.
In a 1994 New York Times op-ed, Anna Quindlen described how Barkett was Borked by such senators as Strom Thurmond, who "spelled out the gory details of every murder case in which the Chief Justice had voted to overturn death sentences." 
New York State correction officers have peace officer status under . This authorizes them:Prior to the 2008 repeal of the death penalty, the male death row was at the Clinton Correctional Facility and the female death row was at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. On October 23, 2007, the New York Court of Appeals ruled in the case "People v. John Taylor" that the last death sentence must be dismissed based on a previous ruling in the case "People v. LaValle".
People v. LaValle, 3 N.Y.3d 88 (2004), was a landmark decision by the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in the U.S. state of New York, in which the court ruled that the state's death penalty statute was unconstitutional because of the statute's direction on how the jury was to be instructed in case of deadlock. New York has since been without the death penalty, as the law has not been amended.
During various periods from the 1600s onward, New York law prescribed the death penalty for crimes such as sodomy, adultery, counterfeiting, perjury, and attempted rape or murder by slaves.[7] In 1796, New York abolished the death penalty for crimes other than murder and treason, but arson was made a capital crime in 1808.[7]
After a series of botched hangings in the United States, there was mounting criticism of this form of capital punishment and the death penalty in general. In 1886, newly elected New York State governor David B. Hill set up a three-member death penalty commission, which was chaired by the human rights advocate and reformer Elbridge Thomas Gerry and included New York lawyer and politician Matthew Hale and Southwick, to investigate a more humane means of execution.
Arshack is a staunch opponent of the death penalty. As President of the New York Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, he appealed to legislators to ensure that New York remains without a death penalty.
In the 2005 Democratic primary for Manhattan District Attorney, incumbent Robert Morgenthau's successful campaign produced television advertisements criticizing opponent Leslie Crocker Snyder, a prosecutor who had stated in her autobiography that in one case, she would have been willing to give a lethal injection to a defendant herself, saying Snyder was "Wrong on the Death Penalty, Wrong for Manhattan".[15] The New York Times endorsed Snyder but expressed concern about her support for the death penalty.[16] For the duration of Morgenthau's tenure as Manhattan District Attorney, he never once sought the death penalty in the period it was legal in New York.[17]
The movement in 1950s and 1960s shifted focus from legislation to the courts. Although public opinion remained in favor of execution (aside from during the mid-1960s when pro and anti opinions were roughly equal), judges and jurors executed fewer people than they did in the 1930s. The decline in executions gave strength to various new anti-capital punishment organizations. Among these groups were: a California-based Citizens Against Legalized Murder, the Ohio Committee to Abolish Capital Punishment, the New Jersey Council to Abolish Capital Punishment, California's People Against Capital Punishment, the New York Committee to Abolish Capital Punishment, the Oregon Council to Abolish the Death Penalty, and the national Committee to Abolish the Federal Death Penalty. In addition to growing organizations, the movement also profited from growing European abolishment of the death penalty and from the controversial executions of Barbara Graham and Caryl Chessman. Success mounted in the late 1950s as Alaska, Hawaii, and Delaware abolished capital punishment. Oregon and Iowa followed their leads in the 1960s. Many other states added laws that restricted the use of the death penalty except in cases of extreme serious offenses. Abolitionists began to strongly challenge the constitutionality of the death penalty in the 1960s. Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund launched a major campaign challenging the death penalty's constitutionality and insisted a moratorium for all executions while it was in process. The United States executed zero people from 1968 to 1976. The anti-death penalty movement's biggest victory of this time period was the Supreme Court Case, "Furman v. Georgia", of 1972. The Supreme Court found the current state of the death penalty unconstitutional due to its "arbitrary and discriminatory manner" of application. The court, however, left states with the option to revamp their laws and make them more constitutional. Twenty eight states did just that and the court eventually allowed the death penalty again through a series of cases in 1976, collectively known as "Gregg v. Georgia".
On June 24, 2004, the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, held 4–3 in People v. LaValle that the state's death penalty statute violated the New York Constitution.[1] Governor Pataki criticized the ruling and promised a quick legislative fix.
In an 1898 op-ed in "The New York Times", prominent physician Austin Flint called for the abolition of the death penalty and suggested more criminology-based methods should be used to reduce crime. Anti-death penalty activism of this period was largely state and locally based. An organization called the Anti-Death Penalty League was established Massachusetts in 1897. However, national leagues, such as the Anti-capital Punishment Society of America and the Committee on Capital Punishment of the National Committee on Prisons, developed shortly after.
New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty
The New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty (NYADP) is a grassroots organization formed in 1992 that advocates through education to abolish capital punishment. It has local chapters in Albany, Buffalo, Ithaca, Long Island, Mid-Hudson, Nassau County, New York City, Rochester, Syracuse, and Westchester. In 2007, the NYADP was successful in gaining abolition of the death penalty by the state legislature. Most of the bill's supporters wanted to establish a sentence of life without parole as the alternative. The NYADP has stated that they have revamped their mission statement to bring together victims, law enforcement, advocates for the mentally ill, restorative justice practitioners, and families of the incarcerated, around policies that address needs and reduce the likelihood of violent crime.
Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
The Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (WCADP) aspires to abolish the death penalty by educating, advocating, and informing the public as well as political leaders. WCADP publishes newsletters, supports Washington's death row inmates, organizes activities that are anti-death penalty, and works with the media to gain coverage on the cause.
Polls showed that the majority of New Yorkers wanted the state's death penalty laws restored. A bill to restore the death penalty passed the Legislature several years in a row, only to be vetoed by Mario Cuomo. Pataki made the issue a top priority of his and when the bill reached his desk he signed it into law in 1995. The state's Court of Appeals later ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in the form in which it was written (in the case of People v. LaValle), and the State Legislature has not passed a bill to restore it in a new form. During Pataki's 12 years as governor, not a single person was executed in New York State.
In the late 1980s, Senator Alfonse D'Amato, from New York State, sponsored a bill to make certain federal drug crimes eligible for the death penalty as he was frustrated by the lack of a death penalty in his home state. Prior to the 1990s bills, federal death penalty cases only covered crimes not in state criminal codes such as treason. Since the 1990s some federal death penalty laws cover acts already covered under state criminal codes. However, before 2001, federal attorneys had a policy stating that there would be no reason to seek a federal death penalty in a state that does not have its own death penalty, and until that point federal attorneys never pursued capital punishment in states without their own death penalties. The policy was later abandoned and Marvin Gabrion, who committed his crime in Michigan, became the first post-"Furman" person in a non-death penalty state to receive the federal death penalty; he was sentenced on March 16, 2002. By October 2009 federal courts gave death sentences to eight other persons from non-death penalty states.
The Democratic Party supports the death penalty far less than the Republican Party. Although most Democrats in Congress have never seriously moved to overturn the rarely used federal death penalty, both Russ Feingold and Dennis Kucinich have introduced such bills with little success. Democrats have led efforts to overturn state death penalty laws, particularly in New Jersey and in New Mexico. They have also sought to prevent the reinstatement of the death penalty in those states which prohibit it, including Massachusetts and New York. During the Clinton administration, Democrats led the expansion of the federal death penalty. These efforts resulted in the passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, signed into law by President Clinton, which heavily limited appeals in death penalty cases.
Caemmerer was a member of the New York State Senate from 1966 until his death in 1982, sitting in the 176th, 177th, 178th, 179th, 180th, 181st, 182nd, 183rd and 184th New York State Legislatures. He was Chairman of the Committee on Villages and Local Government until 1972 and, after the death of Edward J. Speno, became Chairman of the Committee on Transportation. Caemmerer worked to increase penalties on drunk drivers while lowering the maximum allowable blood alcohol content from .15 to eventually .10 in New York State. Caemmerer was also one of the first New York State Legislators to propose a mandatory seatbelt law in the state. Caemmerer was also involved in the first MTA capital plan for New York State. Many in the Senate feel that Caemmerer's crowning achievement was the passage of the child seat law in 1981.
In 2005, supporters of the death penalty in the New York Legislature passed a bill restoring New York's death penalty in the Republican-controlled State Senate,[19][20] but the legislation was voted down by a legislative committee in the Democratic-controlled New York Assembly, and was not enacted into law.[2]
After a series of botched hangings in the United States there was mounting criticism of this form of capital punishment and the death penalty in general. In 1886 newly elected New York State governor David B. Hill set up a three-member death penalty commission to find a more humane form of execution. The committee included Southwick, human rights advocate and reformer Elbridge Thomas Gerry, and New York lawyer and politician Matthew Hale. They explored many forms of execution and in 1888 recommended electrocution using Southwick's electric chair idea with metal conductors attached to the condemned person's head and feet. Based on their advice the first law allowing the use of electrocution went into effect in New York State on January 1, 1889. Development of Southwicks idea into a working device was turned over to the New York Medico-Legal Society.
The New York legislature had passed legislation which would have restored the state's death penalty, but governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, who were both morally opposed to the death penalty, vetoed the legislation.
Prosecutors alleged Wilson was the leader of a violent drug gang called the "Stapleton Crew" (witnesses at the trial denied using that label) that originated in the Stapleton housing projects of Staten Island. He was convicted for murdering NYPD Detectives James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews in a gun sale, then searching their bodies and stealing their car. The victims' family members and fellow police officers greeted pronouncement of his death sentence with cheers and applause; Wilson reacted by sticking his tongue out in their direction.
The case has attracted media attention because of the brutality of the murders as well as the rarity of a death penalty prosecution in New York. Wilson is the first person federally sentenced to the death penalty in New York in over 50 years. Wilson was originally charged in New York state court, but the federal government took over the prosecution after the New York Court of Appeals held that the state's death penalty statute violated the New York State Constitution.
In June 2004, the state's highest court ruled in People v. LaValle that the state's death penalty statute violated the state constitution,[1] and New York has had an effective moratorium on capital punishment since then. Subsequent legislative attempts at fixing or replacing the statute have failed,[2] and in 2008 then-Governor David Paterson issued an executive order disestablishing New York's death row.[3] Legislative efforts to amend the statute have failed, and death sentences are no longer sought at the state level, though certain crimes that fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government are subject to the federal death penalty.[4][5][6]