This Is Why New York’s Death Row Is Completely Empty

Whether New York still has the death penalty is a harder question to answer than it sounds. The law is still on the books, the courts haven’t touched it in years, and yet something happened in 2004 that quietly changed everything.

The state’s death penalty law is technically still on the books (it was never formally repealed), but a 2004 ruling by New York’s highest court found it unconstitutional and effectively shut the whole system down. The case, People v. LaValle, centered on jury instructions that the court found pressured jurors into voting for death to avoid a deadlock.

Lawmakers never fixed the problem. The law sat broken, and in 2007, the last remaining death sentence in the state was quietly converted to life without parole. The following year, Governor David Paterson ordered all execution equipment removed from Green Haven Correctional Facility and closed the chamber for good.

READ MORE: Four Longtime Fugitives Still Wanted by New York State

New York’s last actual execution was in 1963, when Eddie Lee Mays was electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison. More than 60 years later, that record still stands.

A History Longer and Bloodier Than Most People Realize

Before all of that, New York had one of the most extensive histories of executions of any state in the country. From the colonial era through 1963, roughly 1,130 people were put to death by state authorities, second only to Virginia over that same stretch. Hangings dominated for most of that history, but in 1890, New York became the first place in the world to use the electric chair, when William Kemmler was executed at Auburn Prison. The chair went on to claim 695 lives between 1890 and 1963, mostly at Sing Sing, with the pace peaking in the 1930s and 1940s when the state was executing dozens of people a year.

The death penalty itself came and went several times over those centuries. In the 1860s, lawmakers accidentally abolished it by repealing hanging as a method of execution without naming a replacement. It was restored the following year. Later cycles of restriction and reinstatement followed, driven by court rulings and shifting political winds. Governor George Pataki brought it back in 1995 with lethal injection as the designated method, but not a single execution took place before the 2004 ruling ended that chapter, too.

The Federal Exception New Yorkers Often Don’t Know About

What many people miss is that the state ban doesn’t tell the whole story. Federal prosecutors can still seek the death penalty for crimes committed in New York, as long as those crimes fall under federal jurisdiction: things like terrorism, large-scale drug trafficking, killing a federal official, or any crime that crosses state lines.

This isn’t theoretical. In 2023, federal prosecutors sought the death penalty against Sayfullo Saipov for the 2017 Manhattan truck attack that killed eight people. The jury deadlocked on sentencing, and he received life in prison instead.

In 2024, the DOJ announced it would pursue capital charges against Payton Gendron for the racially motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket that killed ten people. And in early 2025, federal prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty against Luigi Mangione for the alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan, a crime that happened in a state where the death penalty has been gone for over 20 years.

As of now, no one is on federal death row for a crime connected to New York. But the possibility is real, and recent cases show federal prosecutors are willing to pursue it.

Bills to Restore and Abolish the Death Penalty Have Both Gone Nowhere

There’s been no serious push to bring the state death penalty back. Since 2004, the New York State Assembly has blocked every attempt to restore a workable capital sentencing statute, and the attempts haven’t been dramatic. A 2008 State Senate bill that would have reinstated the death penalty for killing a law enforcement officer died without a vote in the Assembly, barely making news.

A 2023 Senate bill cast a wider net, covering the killing of a police officer or first responder, multiple murders, hate crime killings, and terrorism. It also went nowhere. On the other side of the ledger, a New York congressman has introduced the Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act, which would end capital punishment at the federal level entirely. It has not advanced.

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The result is a state where the death penalty exists in a kind of permanent legal limbo. The law is still there if you look for it. It just doesn’t do anything; it hasn’t, in any meaningful sense, for over twenty years, left on the books but unchanged, and increasingly distant from the last time it was actually used.