People v. LaValle
People v. LaValle, 3 N.Y.3d 88 (2004), was a landmark decision by the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in the U.S. state of New York, in which the court ruled that the state's death penalty statute was unconstitutional because of the statute's direction on how the jury was to be instructed in case of deadlock. New York has since been without the death penalty, as the law has not been amended.
Eric Henry Monkkonen
Monkkonen's comparison of cities in the United States with other cities in the Western world led him to conclude that violence was endemic in the U.S., which has had a homicide rate much higher than the rest of the Western world except Russia, and over 200 years the murder rate in New York City was five times that of London, even after removing murders with guns. He also found that the U.S. had a disinclination to prosecute murders, such as with the first three decades in 19th century New York City, when most murders went unpunished, and London executed four times the number of offenders.