Veteran New York legislator John R. Dunne voted for the death penalty 12 times during his tenure in the New York Senate. He then went on to serve as an assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice. But his concerns about the fairness and accuracy of capital punishment have now resulted in his opposition to the death penalty. In an op-ed appearing in the New York Daily News, Dunne wrote:

As a member of the New York Senate from 1966 to 1989, I voted 12 times to establish the death penalty in New York. Each time I cast a vote for death, I believed I was doing the right thing. When New York restored the death penalty, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno appointed me to be one of the three original directors of the state’s Capital Defender Office, established to provide counsel for indigent defendants facing death.

But the last decade taught me that you cannot tinker with the death penalty. During those years, I watched a steady stream of respected leaders change their minds on capital punishment, including judges who had long enforced the death penalty. I read the stories of one innocent person after another walking off Death Row after being sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit. These experiences brought me into contact with some of the thorniest issues surrounding the death penalty.

It is unfair to ask jurors to choose with certainty between life and death, given the stress, pressure, media clamor and confusion surrounding their weighty decision. We cannot expect our police to pursue all reasonable lines of inquiry once a suspect is ID’d. And prosecutors are unable to oversee the police in every case. Judges are neither always free of bias nor intellectually capable in every case. These are the issues that must be addressed.

The Assembly Codes Committee is poised to reject the death penalty when it votes this week. Those who have not yet changed their views with the times have demanded that the Assembly bring this bill to the floor for a vote by all of its members. As a legislator for more than 20 years, I can assure you a bill that dies in committee has been through a full and appropriate legislative process.

The Codes Committee is right to kill the death penalty, and the Assembly is right to consider the matter closed. Their act will leave life imprisonment without parole as the top punishment for first-degree murder in New York.

I regret my votes in favor of the death penalty. When the Codes Committee institutionalizes its opposition to the death penalty in a few days, I will be grateful.

(New York Daily News, April 10, 2005). See New Voices, Innocence and New York and the Death Penalty.