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.
Capital punishment
The United States and Japan are the only developed countries to have recently carried out executions. The U.S. federal government, the U.S. military, and 31 states have a valid death penalty statute, and over 1,400 executions have been carried in the United States since it reinstated the death penalty in 1976, including 28 in 2015 alone. Japan has 109 inmates with finalized death sentences , after executing 15 inmates including Shoko Asahara and six other senior members of Aum Shinrikyo, a cult group which carried out multiple atrocities involving thousands of victims such as the Tokyo subway sarin attack, which took place on 20 March 1995, on 6 July 2018 followed by the executions of the remaining six senior members on 26 July 2018.