PAST ARTICLES AND EDITORIAL BOARDS
The Death Penalty in New
York: An Historical Perspective
Michael Lumer & Nancy Tenney
4 J.L. & Pol'y 81 (1995)
"The Death Penalty in New York: An Historical Perspective" examines New York's use of the death penalty from 1890 to the present. The first section of the article details how New York became the first state to establish a statewide system for imposing capital punishment by means of the electric chair. It goes on to explain the evolution of New York's first-degree murder statutes through 1963, when the last execution took place in New York, and the subsequent political maneuvering that eventually led to the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1995.

The second part of this article evaluates the 695 electrocutions that took place in New York between 1890 and 1963. It provides a statistical analysis of these executions in terms of the race, age and gender of the defendants, the race of the victims, and the geographical breakdown of where in the state those executions took place. The data indicates that New York's death penalty was imposed disproportionately on African-American and immigrant defendants, and that the race of the victim played a significant role in determining which defendants were sentenced to death. The article concludes that, at the very least, these historical trends should prompt a searching scrutiny of the newly-enacted death penalty statute and its application.