High court overturns death sentence
-
- October
- 23
The state Court of Appeals today overturned the death penalty of a 43-year-old Queens man convicted of killing five employees during the robbery of a Wendy’s restaurant in Queens in 2000.
  In a 4-3 decision, the court ruled that the state’s death-penaly statute is unconstitutional, and sent the case back to the Supreme Court for resentencing.
  The ruling effectively ends the chances of anyone being executed in New York unless the Legislature changes the statute to allow jurors to consider a life-without-parole sentence besides the death penalty. The Senate supports such a change, but the Assembly doesn’t.
  No one has been executed in New York since 1963. The Legislature reinstituted the law in 1995, but one one was put to death as a result.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 10:32 am by Jay Gallagher.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Share and Enjoy: | 
Print This Post
| 
Email This Post
Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
