Eddie Lee Mays
Mays would become the last person to be executed by "Old Sparky", New York State's electric chair at Sing Sing prison. The State Electrician was Dow Hover. The electric chair had been the sole method of execution in the State since 1890 (hanging had been abolished in 1888). In 1965, the State of New York repealed the death penalty, except for cases involving the murder of a police officer. Although the legislature never fully repealed the death penalty statute, and the state even expanded it in 1995, there were no further executions because of rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 and the New York Court of Appeals in 2004.
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.