Capital punishment in New York has not been practiced since 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. The state is third in recorded number of executions since 1608, after Virginia and Texas. 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. In June 2004, the state's highest court ruled in People v. LaValle that the state's death penalty statute violated the state constitution, and New York has had an effective moratorium on capital punishment since then. Subsequent legislative attempts at fixing or replacing the statute have failed, and in 2008 then-Governor David Paterson issued an executive order disestablishing New York's death row.
Read more about Capital Punishment In New York: Temporary Abolition, Introduction of The Electric Chair, Restrictions, Furman V. Georgia, Grasso Extradition and Execution, Restoration, Statute Declared Unconstitutional, Last Death Sentence Commuted, Public Hearings, Political Significance in Manhattan District Attorney Election, Legislative Efforts To Reinstate The Death Penalty, Death Row Disestablished, See Also
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“We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietly done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
“Shame is a fitter and generally a more effectual punishment for a child than beating.”
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“New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.... Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own. But here in New York I was ignorant, insignificant, unimportant—one in millions whose destiny concerned no one. New York did not even know of my existence. Nor did it care.”
—Agnes Smedley (1890–1950)