Highest Court To Hear Appeal, Decide Fate of Death Penalty

The state's highest court today will hear an appeal by the last inmate on New York's death row. In the process, the Court of Appeals, which sits in Albany, will decide the future of capital punishment in New York State, legal analysts say.

There has been no active death penalty statute in the state since 2004, when the Court of Appeals struck down capital punishment on a technical point involving the instructions judges gave jurors. That decision, however, does not automatically protect John Taylor, whose death sentence was handed down in 2002, from execution.

The court's decision in the appeal will determine whether the earlier ruling only applies to some capital prosecutions, or to all. The effect of a ruling upholding Taylor's death sentence could be to revive death penalty prosecutions across the state.

Taylor's case underscores the unusual history of capital punishment in New York. Although the state has not carried out an execution since 1963 and it abolished the death penalty altogether two years later, capital punishment re-emerged as a major political issue in the middle of the last decade when, during his successful campaign for the governorship, George Pataki pledged to revive the death penalty. Seven death sentences were issued under the new death penalty statute, which became effective in 1995.

Appeals to overturn those sentences have so far been successful. Now only Taylor is left on the state's death row within the Clinton Correctional Facility, near the Canadian border in Dannemora, N.Y.

"One of the questions that might be answered here is whether we again have an abolitionist court willing to reach out and block every conceivable execution," a professor at New York Law School who advocates the death penalty in certain instances, Robert Blecker, said.

During a 2000 robbery, Taylor, along with a mentally retarded accomplice, massacred employees at a Wendy's restaurant in Flushing, Queens. Taylor and the accomplice, Craig Godineaux, bound seven employees and shot them all in the head. Two survived.

The case has led to the emergence of the district attorney for Queens, Richard Brown, as a champion of the state's death penalty statute. Lawyers at Mr. Brown's office will argue that Taylor's case presents legal issues that fall beyond the scope of the 2004 case, according to court papers.

In that case, known as The People v. Stephen LaValle, the court found that individual jurors were at risk of being pressured to impose death sentences out of fear that a deadlock would result in a defendant they had found guilty of a capital offense getting less than a life sentence. During Taylor's sentencing, however, the judge said that, in the event of a deadlock, he would almost "certainly impose" a sentence of 175 years, leading the Queens prosecutor's appeals lawyers to argue that concerns about juror coercion could not have played a role in the jury's decision to sentence Taylor to death.

Taylor's legal team has argued that the current appeal merely revisits ground covered by People v. LaValle. Taylor's attorneys are led by the state's capital defender, Kevin Doyle, who is urging the court to rule that, by the reasoning of the 2004 decision, to uphold a death sentence for Taylor would be to reverse the earlier decision.

"I'm very hopeful the principle of stare decisis will prevail," Mr. Doyle, said, referring to the legal principle of honoring precedent. The makeup of the state's seven-member Court of Appeals have changed dramatically since the People v. LaValle decision. Since then, two of the four judges who joined the majority opinion have retired and the positions of their replacements, Judges Eugene Pigott and Theodore Jones, are unknown.

Mr. Doyle and two lawyers from his office, Susan Salomon and Barry Fisher, will argue on behalf of Taylor today. Three assistant district attorneys from Mr. Brown's office, Garry Fidel, John Castellano, and Donna Aldea, will present arguments on behalf of the state.