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| New York Court Rules Inmate Cannot Be Executed |
| By New York Times |
| Published: 07/17/2002 |
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New York's highest court ruled last week that the first man condemned to death under the state's 1995 death-penalty law cannot be executed because the statute included a constitutional flaw at the time of his trial. The Court of Appeals issued a 6-to-1 opinion ordering that Darrel K. Harris, who admitted he killed three people at a Brooklyn social club in December 1997, should be resentenced and that the maximum sentence he could face would be life in prison without parole. A majority of the judges upheld Mr. Harris's conviction, rejecting the defense's arguments that the jury selection was biased and that some testimony at the trial should not have been allowed or should have been rebutted. But the court threw out Mr. Harris's death sentence on the grounds that he was tried under a law with flawed plea-bargaining provisions that encouraged defendants to plead guilty rather than risk death after a trial. The court struck down those provisions in 1998, shortly after Mr. Harris's conviction, saying the law gave defendants an incentive to forgo their constitutional right to a speedy trial and their right not to incriminate themselves. Because the court threw out the death sentence, the judges avoided ruling on the larger question of whether the death penalty violates the New York State constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. |
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