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.
Glossip v. Gross
4) "Most places within the United States have abandoned its use": Beside being cruel, Breyer believed the death penalty is also unusual because it has become rare. Noting that 41 states had the death penalty before the Court blocked it in 1972, now there are 31, and only three, Texas, Missouri, and Florida, account for 80% of executions. After listing execution statistics, Breyer next considered polling data and an American Law Institute report. Breyer finally considered the death penalty as even more unusual by looking at a vote by the United Nations General Assembly, reports by the International Commission Against the Death Penalty and Amnesty International statistics.