New York's highest court issued a decision which Assembly-member Dale Volker, the original sponsor of the statute, called the "last nail in the coffin" for our state's death penalty law.
People v. Taylor involved the headline-grabbing case of John Taylor and Craig Godineax, convicted of killing five people, execution-style, in a Wendy's restaurant back in 2000.
Death penalty advocates and opponents closely tracked this case to see if the Court of Appeals would uphold its 2004 decision in People v. LaValle , which involved a schoolteacher stabbed to death with a screwdriver after she chastised LaValle for urinating in public. In a 4-3 decision, the court hobbled the death penalty by striking down the law's "deadlock provision" while finding that it was inseverable from the statute as a whole and thus required that the law to be rewritten by the Legislature.
The "deadlock provision" required an instruction to juries -- should they deadlock over death or a life sentence without parole -- that judges were required to sentence the criminal defendant to a 20-25 year term, with the possibility of parole. And, as it did in LaValle , the Court of Appeals in Taylor found the provision to be unconstitutional "because of the risk that it might coerce jurors into giving up their conscientious beliefs in order to reach a verdict." (The court noted that our death penalty statute was the only one in the entire country that required an instruction to the jury that, if a unanimous decision could not be reached, the judge was required to hand down a more lenient sentence.)
The nuance presented in Taylor was that trial court judge in that case had instructed the jury that if they were to reach a deadlock he would "almost certainly" sentence Taylor to 175 years in prison, thus deflating the concern that the jury would feel coerced to vote for death to avert the possibility of parole.
In its decision, the Court of Appeals rejected the trial judge's attempt to cure the law's defect because "doing so would condone a trial court's remaking of an unconstitutional statute into a new statute not subject to the legislative process." The court also applied the venerable judicial doctrine of stare decisis deferring to its decision in LaValle .
In a rebuke of the court's 3-4 decision, Judge Read -- a dissenter -- wrote, "fair-minded citizens might well be forgiven for wondering whether [this court] is simply unwilling ever to uphold a death sentence, no matter how the law is written (or may be rewritten), no matter how carefully the trial judge and the jury carry out their responsibilities."
The New York State Legislature may also share that bewilderment for it has been unable to craft a bill correcting the law's constitutional infirmities.
Could our Assembly be deadlocked? (And, what instruction need we give them?)
To download a copy of the Court of Appeals's decision in this case, please use this link: People v. Taylor