Death Penalty Turnaround

The reasons for this shift in attitude are myriad. A spate of revelations of wrongful convictions, including the exoneration of 13 death row inmates in Illinois, has focused on the impossibility of drafting a law so airtight that it would never catch an innocent person in its clutches. Growing majorities of New Yorkers have told pollsters that they prefer life without parole as the maximum sentence for those convicted of the most heinous crimes.

I was always opposed to the death penalty, but it unexpectedly became intensely personal for me in 1995 when my wife, Linda, first suspected that the man known as the Unabomber could be my brother, Ted. I knew Ted was mentally ill, but I never saw him as violent. Yet when newspapers across the country published his manifesto, it was clear to us that Ted was most likely the Unabomber.

I was faced with a dilemma that even in retrospect seems overwhelming. If I turned my brother in, I knew there was the possibility he would face execution. If I did nothing, I knew there was a likelihood that another innocent person would die as a result of his actions.

The only promise I received from the federal agents I worked with to capture my brother in his Montana cabin was that they would keep our family's involvement secret, a promise that was not kept.

But even as we successfully fought to keep Ted from getting the death penalty, I learned of many other cases of families who couldn't keep loved ones off death row, loved ones who committed murders but also suffered from mental illness and didn't have access to the lawyers and attention that Ted's case drew.

Those cases included Californian Bill Babbitt, whose brother, Manny, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who wrestled with demons similar to my brother's, was convicted of killing an elderly woman in Sacramento. Bill, who has become my close friend, had to undergo the trauma of watching his brother executed at San Quentin prison.

Here in New York, the death penalty was reinstated in 1995 in a law that was meant to meet the U.S. Supreme Court's requirement that states create statutes that it would not be "cruel and unusual." At that time, Gov. George Pataki took office after unseating Mario Cuomo in a campaign in large part aimed at Cuomo's annual veto of pro-death penalty legislation. Pataki and the legislature quickly enacted the new death penalty law.