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| High Court Vacates Death Sentence Against N.Y. Killer |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 11/26/2003 |
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New York's highest court Tuesday spared the life of James Cahill III, who had been sentenced to die by lethal injection for fatally poisoning his wife in 1998. The Court of Appeals vacated Cahill's death sentence after a 4-2 majority found there was not enough evidence to support the aggravating factors that led to a jury imposing the death penalty in his case. Instead, the court ordered Cahill to be resentenced in Onondaga County Court on a second-degree murder count. The 44-year-old Cahill will face a minimum term of 15 years to life in prison with the possibility of parole. It was the second time the high court has heard appeals of capital convictions under Republican Gov. George Pataki's 1995 death penalty statute. In the first appeal, the judges last year also vacated the death sentence meted out to Darrel Harris for killing three people during a Brooklyn bar robbery, citing an unconstitutional element of the capital punishment statute. In both cases, the Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of the two condemned men and did not order new trials. Harris has since been resentenced to life without parole. Five other men remain on death row in New York state following Cahill's removal. Another 120 inmates are serving life without parole in state prisons, an alternative sentence to death under the 1995 capital punishment statute. Cahill faced lethal injection for poisoning his 41-year-old wife Jill to death with potassium cyanide. She was in a Syracuse hospital at the time recuperating from a severe beating Cahill inflicted on her six months earlier with a baseball bat during a violent argument at their home. Prosecutors did not prove that Cahill had either murdered his wife to prevent her from testifying against him in court or while burglarizing her hospital room, two aggravating factors necessary to sustain a capital charge, the Court of Appeals said Tuesday. William Fitzpatrick, the Onondaga County district attorney who prosecuted Cahill, said Tuesday he was considering whether to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. No inmate has been executed in New York since 1963. |
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