Eddie Lee Mays
Mays would become the last person to be executed by "Old Sparky", New York State's electric chair at Sing Sing prison. The State Electrician was Dow Hover. The electric chair had been the sole method of execution in the State since 1890 (hanging had been abolished in 1888). In 1965, the State of New York repealed the death penalty, except for cases involving the murder of a police officer. Although the legislature never fully repealed the death penalty statute, and the state even expanded it in 1995, there were no further executions because of rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 and the New York Court of Appeals in 2004.
Cheshire, Connecticut, home invasion murders
Hayes is an inmate of the Connecticut Department of Correction. His criminal history shows him sentenced for his first offense at the age of 16. Subsequent to sentencing for the Petit murders, and up until August 16, 2016 (when he was transferred to a correctional facility in Pennsylvania as part of an interstate corrections compact), he was incarcerated in the Northern Correctional Institution, which houses the state's death row for men, in Somers, Connecticut. The method of execution employed by Connecticut was lethal injection, and the state execution chamber was located in the Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers. This sentence became an automatic life sentence when Connecticut abolished the death penalty in 2015.