Capital punishment in New York
In June 2004, the state's highest court ruled in "People v. LaValle" that the state's death penalty statute violated the state constitution, and New York has had an effective moratorium on capital punishment since then. Subsequent legislative attempts at fixing or replacing the statute have failed, and in 2008 then-Governor David Paterson issued an executive order disestablishing New York's death row. Legislative efforts to amend the statute have failed, and death sentences are no longer sought at the state level, though certain crimes that fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government are subject to the federal death penalty.
List of people executed in New Jersey
In 2006, New Jersey lawmakers drafted a moratorium on executions while a task force studied the fairness and cost of the death sentence. New Jersey had 10 people on Death Row at the time. On December 10, 2007, the New Jersey Senate passed bill to repeal the current death penalty statute, and replaced it with life imprisonment without parole. On Dec. 13, 2007, the state's General Assembly adopted the same law. Governor Corzine signed the bill into law on December 17, 2007.
A complete list of 15,269 executions in the United States prior to the reintroduction of capital punishment in the 1970s was compiled by M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla, and was made available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.