Capital punishment in New York
In 1995, Governor George Pataki signed a new statute into law which returned the death penalty in New York by authorizing lethal injection for execution.
Subsequent legislative attempts at fixing or replacing the statute have failed,[7] and in July 2008 Governor David Paterson issued an executive order disestablishing New York's death row.
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.
The commission included the human rights advocate and reformer Elbridge Thomas Gerry, New York lawyer and politician Matthew Hale, and Buffalo dentist and experimenter Alfred P.
[10] Southwick had been developing an idea since the early 1880s of using electric current as a means of capital punishment after hearing about how relatively painlessly and quickly a drunken man died due to grabbing the energized parts on a generator.
A bill making electrocution New York State's form of execution passed the legislature and was signed by Governor Hill on June 4, 1888, set to go into effect on January 1, 1889.
A lesser known but contemporaneously notorious case dates to January 1936, when serial killer Albert Fish was put to death for the cannibal murder of 10-year-old Grace Budd.
Another notable case was that of the "Lonely Hearts Killers" Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, who were convicted of three murders but are believed to have killed as many as 20 women between 1947 and 1949.
"[14] In 1965, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a liberal Republican who supported capital punishment, signed legislation which abolished the death penalty except for cases involving the murder of a police officer.
[15] In the July 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the existing death penalty procedures across the United States.
There was legislation to return the death penalty as a sanction that passed the Assembly and Senate, but was vetoed by Democratic Governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo.
[21] Capital punishment was reinstated in New York in 1995 when Republican Governor George Pataki signed a new statute into law, which provided for execution by lethal injection.
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".
[26] In the 2009 Democratic primary in which Morgenthau did not run, Snyder ran for District Attorney again, against Cyrus Vance Jr. (who would win) and Richard Aborn.
Snyder accused Vance and Aborn of taking her comments out of context, and stated that her position on the death penalty had changed due to learning about wrongful convictions.
On August 2, 2018, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he was advancing legislation to remove the death penalty statute from New York State law.
