Joseph Bruno
Bruno, along with Governor George Pataki and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, was instrumental in returning the death penalty to New York State in 1995. The New York Court of Appeals (the highest state court in New York) later found the law to be unconstitutional because it gave jurors deadlocked between life without parole and execution no choice but to give eligibility for parole after 25 years; the Court of Appeals feared that jurors faced with this choice would unfairly lean toward a death sentence. In the 10 years after the law was passed, New York's crime rate plummeted without ever seeing an execution, perhaps weakening public support for the death penalty. Silver let the law die in 2005 without much debate.
Alfred P. Southwick
After a series of botched hangings in the United States there was mounting criticism of this form of capital punishment and the death penalty in general. In 1886 newly elected New York State governor David B. Hill set up a three-member death penalty commission to find a more humane form of execution. The committee included Southwick, human rights advocate and reformer Elbridge Thomas Gerry, and New York lawyer and politician Matthew Hale. They explored many forms of execution and in 1888 recommended electrocution using Southwick's electric chair idea with metal conductors attached to the condemned person's head and feet. Based on their advice the first law allowing the use of electrocution went into effect in New York State on January 1, 1889. Development of Southwicks idea into a working device was turned over to the New York Medico-Legal Society.