Five people were murdered pleading for their lives in the Wendy's massacre. The killer was John Taylor. He was sentenced to death but he was re-sentenced this past week to life.(AP News)
New York State's legislators run on the platform of support for the death penalty but the last execution was in 1963. The state's law then, like all death penalty laws was declared unconstitutional in 1972 by the United States Supreme Court. Since the composition of the judges of New York States is uniformly liberal and adverse to the death penalty, the following pattern has been repeated three or four times since 1976:
- Legislation is passed attempting to pass the Court's criteria for a constitutional death penalty.
- Someone is convicted.
- The law is found to have a defect and the sentence is overturned.
- Legislators are outraged and vow to write a bill that corrects this defect.
The sort of plain language death penalty laws other states have has already been found to be unconstitutional in New York, so each new death penalty law has very specific process directions to prosecutors and judges that are a legal minefield. I suspect that the law is becoming so complex that it gets sabotaged each time as it is being drafted by hiding something in it that offers a pretense for overturning it down the road.
The specific defect in the Wendy's Massacre case was the instruction mandated by the law to be given by the judge to break a deadlock, namely that the judge instructs the jury exactly what the law says will happen to a defendant if the deadlock is not broken. This instruction itself, or maybe its mandate was unconstitutional. We're back to legislative outrage phase listed above. It's law-writing whack-a-mole.
New York is not alone in states where the de-facto legislature is its high courts. Before we move on to discuss the death penalty as matter of Catholic morality, I want to bring up this item in the news and the practical impossibility of there being an actual execution in New York state.
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