The last execution in New York State was carried out on August 15, 1963, when Eddie Lee Mays died in the electric chair at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining. No one has been executed under New York State authority in the more than six decades since, and a 2004 ruling from the state’s highest court left the death penalty statute unenforceable.
Who Eddie Lee Mays Was
Mays was convicted of first-degree murder and robbery for fatally shooting a woman during a tavern holdup in East Harlem. He was electrocuted at Sing Sing, which had been the sole site of New York’s state executions since 1914. Electrocution had been the state’s exclusive method since 1890, and 614 people were put to death in Sing Sing’s electric chair over those decades. Mays was the last of them.
Nothing about the Mays case marked it, at the time, as the end of an era. No court had struck down the death penalty, and no governor had declared a moratorium. Executions simply stopped happening while legal challenges mounted around the country.
Why Executions Stopped After 1963
The 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia halted executions nationwide. The ruling did not ban capital punishment outright, but it found that the way states were applying it was so arbitrary that it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Any state that wanted to keep executing people had to rewrite its laws.
New York tried. A 1974 law made death mandatory for certain murders, including the killing of police officers, correctional officers, and killings committed by inmates serving long sentences. The idea was that a mandatory sentence removed the arbitrariness Furman had targeted. New York’s Court of Appeals disagreed. In People v. Davis (1977), it struck down the mandatory death sentence for killing a police or corrections officer because the law allowed no consideration of mitigating factors. In People v. Smith (1984), it struck down the provision covering murders by inmates on the same reasoning.1NYCourts.gov. New York’s Death Penalty Saga By the mid-1980s, New York had no functioning death penalty.
The 1995 Statute and the LaValle Ruling
Governor George Pataki signed a new death penalty bill in 1995, after twelve years of vetoes by Governor Mario Cuomo. The new law designated lethal injection as the method of execution, required a proportionality review by the Court of Appeals, and used a bifurcated trial that separated guilt from sentencing. It applied to crimes committed on or after September 1, 1995.
The statute lasted nearly a decade before one provision brought it down. Criminal Procedure Law ยง 400.27(10) required the trial judge to tell jurors in the penalty phase that if they could not unanimously agree on either death or life without parole, the court would impose a sentence of life with parole eligibility after 20 to 25 years.2Justia Law. People v Stephen LaValle A juror who thought life without parole was the right sentence had reason to vote for death anyway, out of fear that a deadlock would let the defendant eventually go free.
In People v. LaValle (2004), the Court of Appeals held that this deadlock instruction violated the due process protections of the New York State Constitution. The court reasoned that if even one juror genuinely believed death was not warranted, a death sentence should not be imposed, and the instruction’s coercive effect undermined that principle.2Justia Law. People v Stephen LaValle
The legislature could have rewritten the deadlock instruction and left the rest of the statute intact. It never did. A 2005 legislative committee voted down a bill to reinstate a workable death penalty, and no later effort gained traction. In 2007, the Court of Appeals decided People v. Taylor, reducing the last existing death sentence to life in prison and leaving death row empty.1NYCourts.gov. New York’s Death Penalty Saga In 2008, Governor David Paterson issued an executive order requiring the removal of all execution equipment from state facilities, and the lethal injection chamber at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County was dismantled.3New York State Assembly. Bill A06257
Where Things Stand Now
New York has no functioning death penalty. The 1995 statute technically remains on the books because the legislature never formally repealed it, but it is unenforceable after LaValle. No one sits on death row in the state, and no mechanism exists to impose a new death sentence under state law.
Federal law is a separate track. Crimes committed in New York that violate federal statutes can still carry the federal death penalty, and that authority is unaffected by what the state has done. As of 2026, two high-profile federal capital cases involve crimes committed in New York. Payton Gendron, who killed ten people in the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting, faces a federal death penalty trial scheduled to begin in late 2026. Luigi Mangione, charged in the 2024 killing of a health insurance executive in Manhattan, also faces potential federal capital prosecution. Both proceed under federal authority.