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New York
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News
Mar 13, 2023
Federal Jury Returns a Life Verdict in New York for Sayfullo Saipov

On March 13, 2023, a jury in the federal death penalty prosecution of Sayfullo Saipov in New York City concluded its deliberations without coming to a unanimous decision regarding sentencing. As a result, Saipov will be sentenced to life in prison without parole. On January 26, the jury had unanimously found the defendant guilty of murdering eight people in 2017 by deliberately ramming a truck onto a crowded Manhattan bike path. Neither Saipov nor his attorneys contested his involvement in the crime.
Read MoreFeb 02, 2023
Penalty Phase Scheduled to Begin in Federal Capital Trial of Sayfullo Saipov
Sayfullo Saipov (pictured) was found guilty in federal court on January 26, 2023 of killing eight people on a New York City bike path in 2017 by driving a truck into a crowd of people. He will now likely be the first person to face a federal capital penalty hearing during President Biden’s administration. On February 6, 2023, a jury in Manhattan will begin hearing evidence to determine whether Saipov will be sentenced to death or life without parole. The jury must vote unanimously for a death sentence to result.
Read MoreSep 07, 2022
Family Members of Buffalo Mass Shooting Want Focus on Preventing Racial Violence, Not Death Penalty
As federal prosecutors consider what punishment to seek against the accused gunman in the May 2022 mass shooting at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, survivors and family members of victims of the shooting are concerned that pursuing the death penalty will further spread the racial hatred that fueled the massacre and divert attention from meaningful action to combat white supremacist violence.
Read MoreMar 18, 2021
New York Judge Finds Queens Prosecutor Lied to Convict Three Men Wrongfully Imprisoned in 1990s Death-Penalty Case
A New York City judge has released three men from prison after 24 years imprisonment for murder, finding that a high-ranking prosecutor in the Queens County District Attorney’s office deliberately concealed exculpatory evidence while pursuing the death penalty against a teenage defendant.
Read MoreSep 11, 2018
Defense Moves to Bar Death Penalty in New York Bike-Path Killings, Citing “Nakedly Political” Tweets
Defense attorneys for Sayfullo Saipov (pictured), the man accused of killing eight people by driving a truck onto a Manhattan bike path on October 31, 2017, have asked a New York federal district court to bar the U.S. government from seeking the death penalty against Saipov. Arguing that President Donald Trump has unconstitutionally injected “nakedly political considerations” into the Department of Justice’s charging decision, Saipov’s lawyers on September 6, 2018, filed a motion before Judge Vincent Broderick to preclude federal prosecutors from pursuing the death penalty or, alternatively, “to appoint…
Read MoreJan 12, 2018
Experience Shows No “Parade of Horribles” Following Abolition of the Death Penalty
States that have recently abolished the death penalty have not experienced the “parade of horribles” — including increased murder rates — predicted by death-penalty proponents, according to death-penalty experts who participated in a panel discussion at the 2017 American Bar Association national meeting in New York City. Instead, the panelists said, abolition appears to have created opportunities to move forward with other broader criminal justice reforms.
Read MoreMay 04, 2016
Two Capital Cases Involving Innocence Claims Resolved Decades After Conviction
This week, two decades-old cases involving men with innocence claims reached final resolution: Louisiana inmate Gary Tyler (pictured) was released after 42 years in prison and Paul Gatling was exonerated in New York more than 50 years after his wrongful conviction. Both men had once faced the death penalty. Tyler was convicted and sentenced to death for the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old white boy in 1974 during a riot over school integration. A white mob had attacked a bus filled with black students, including Tyler. After the shooting, Tyler…
Read MoreMar 16, 2016
Judge Finds Ronell Wilson Has Intellectual Disability, Removes His Federal Death Sentence
United States District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis (pictured) ruled on March 15 that federal death row inmate Ronell Wilson is ineligible for the death penalty because he has intellectual disability. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Atkins v. Virginia that the death penalty constituted cruel and unusual punishment when applied to people diagnosed with intellectual disability, then known as mental retardation. Wilson was first sentenced to death in New York federal district court in 2007, but his death sentence was overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct. Before his second…
Read MoreJul 25, 2013
Only Inmate to Receive Federal Death Penalty in New York Again Sentenced to Death
On July 24, Ronell Wilson was re-sentenced to death by a federal jury in New York. Despite numerous capital prosecutions by the Department of Justice, no other person in the state has been given the death penalty since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988. New York’s state death penalty law was found unconstitutional by the state Court of Appeals in 2004. By 2007, all seven of those sentenced to death under the state law had their sentences overturned. Wilson was first sentenced to death in 2007 for the…
Read MoreApr 16, 2013
NEW VOICES: PBS Airing of “The Central Park Five” Underscores Problem of Innocence
George F. Will, conservative commentator of the Washington Post, recently drew a lesson about the death penalty from the documentary The Central Park Five, which airs on PBS on Tuesday, April 16. Will wrote, “[T]his recounting of a multifaceted but, fortunately, not fatal failure of the criminal justice system buttresses the conservative case against the death penalty: Its finality leaves no room for rectifying mistakes.” The Central Park Five tells the story of five juvenile defendants (four African Americans and one Hispanic) who were convicted of the 1989 rape and…
Read MoreMar 19, 2013
Prominent Former Prosecutors Fight for Death Row Inmate’s Life
Former Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau has joined two other former prosecutors in filing an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of William Kuenzel, an Alabama death row inmate sentenced to death in 1988. New evidence emerged in 2010 raising doubts about his guilt. According to Morgenthau’s brief, two witnesses who testified against Kuenzel gave entirely different accounts that did not identify him when they first met with authorities. One of the witnesses admitted being involved in the murder. Morgenthau, who retired from the D.A.‘s office…
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History of the Death Penalty
New York’s hisory of capital punishment goes back to colonial times, with the second most executions of any state from 1608 to 1972, after Virginia. Before the invention of the electric chair most executions were carried out by hanging, although other methods including burning at the stake, death by firing squad, and even the breaking wheel were used. Although there were prisoners on New York’s death row until 2007, no execution has taken place since that of Eddie Mays in 1963.
Famous Cases
Perhaps the most notable execution to take place in the State of New York was that of William Kemmler in 1890. Convicted of murdering his common law wife with a hatchet, Kemmler was the first man executed with the newly developed electric chair.
Previous executions had been carried out almost exclusively by hanging. The State of New York had assigned a committee to develop a more humane method of execution. The concept of execution by means of electricity materialized after a dentist witnessed an intoxicated man die quickly and painlessly (in his estimation) after walking into exposed power lines. After several months of development, as well as a trial execution on a horse, it was determined that Kemmler would be the first to be executed in the electric chair. Kemmler’s appeal of the new method reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld electrocution as a constitutional form of punishment.
On August 6th, 1890, Kemmler was strapped into the electric chair at the Auburn State Prison in front of a small group of witnesses. The switch was thrown, and a 1000 volt current passed through Kemmler’s body for 17 seconds after which he was declared dead. However, several witnesses noted that Kemmler was still breathing and heard Kemmler groaning softly. The switch was thrown again using a higher voltage. Witnesses reported an awful smell of burning flesh and singeing hair, and blood vessels beneath Kemmlers skin burst and bled. Despite the gruesome accounts of the electrcution, the electric chair soon became the dominant form of execution in the United States until its replacement with lethal injection.
Milestones in Abolition/Reinstatement
The death penalty has been abolished and reinstated several times in New York. New York’s death penalty was accidentally abolished in 1860, when the legislature passed measures that repealed hanging as a method of execution but provided no other means of carrying out a death sentence. The mistake was corrected a year later in 1861.
Lewis E. Lawes, the warden of Sing Sing Prison from 1920-1941, advocated for the abolition of capital punishment. Although he supervised 303 executions, Lawes believed that capital punishment was inequitable and not a deterrent. He noted that barely 1 in 80 killers was executed, and said “Did you ever see a rich man go the whole route through to the Death House? I don’t know of any.”
In 1967, a compromise law was passed allowing for a very limited death penalty. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated all death penalty statutes in the country in Furman v. Georgia. The New York legislature rewrote the state’s statute in 1973, providing for a mandatory death sentence for murdering a police officer, a correctional officer, or a murder in prison by an inmate serving a life sentence. In 1977, New York’s high court effectively struck down the death penalty for the murder of a police officer or a correctional officer, and a 1984 ruling struck down capital punishment for murders committed by inmates serving life sentences, effectively abolishing New York’s death penalty. From 1978 until 1994, measures repeatedly passed both houses of New York’s state legislature that would have expanded or reinstated the death penalty, only to be vetoed by governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo.
In 1995 newly-elected Governor George Pataki fulfilled a campaign promise and signed legislation reinstating the death penalty in New York, designating lethal injection as the new method of execution. In 2004, that statute was declared unconstitutional by the New York Court of Appeals, and in 2007 the last remaining death sentence was reduced to life, leaving New York with a vacant death row and no viable death penalty laws. In 2008 Governor David Paterson issued an executive order requiring the removal of all execution equipment from state facilities.

