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.
Marvin Gabrion
The case received national attention both for the brutality of the crime and for the controversial sentence. The crime was committed in Michigan, which does not have the death penalty, but prosecutors in federal court were able to seek a death sentence because the murder took place on federal land. Gabrion is the first person in the United States to receive the death penalty for a crime committed in a non-death penalty state since federal capital punishment was reinstated in 1988 as well as the first person to be sentenced to death in the state of Michigan since 1937.