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.
Steven W. Fisher
The jury convicted Taylor of murder and Fisher became the last New York State court judge to assess the death penalty after the New York Court of Appeals ended the imposition of capital punishment in New York in 2004, ruling in Taylor's appeal that "The death penalty statute is unconstitutional on its face, and it is not within our power to save the statute."