Regular Session - June 13, 2006
3719
1 NEW YORK STATE SENATE
2
3
4 THE STENOGRAPHIC RECORD
5
6
7
8
9 ALBANY, NEW YORK
10 June 13, 2006
11 12:10 p.m.
12
13
14 REGULAR SESSION
15
16
17
18 LT. GOVERNOR MARY O. DONOHUE, President
19 STEVEN M. BOGGESS, Secretary
20
21
22
23
24
25
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1 P R O C E E D I N G S
2 THE PRESIDENT: The Senate will
3 please come to order.
4 I ask everyone present to please
5 rise and repeat with me the Pledge of
6 Allegiance.
7 (Whereupon, the assemblage recited
8 the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.)
9 THE PRESIDENT: With us once
10 again is the Reverend Peter G. Young, pastor
11 of Blessed Sacrament Church in Bolton Landing,
12 New York.
13 REVEREND YOUNG: Let us pray.
14 As we enjoy today's sunshine, we
15 hear of Alberto's storm warnings hitting the
16 Florida Gulf shores.
17 New York State has been blessed by
18 You, O God, with outstanding and natural
19 resources that our legislators enjoy and
20 protect. We are reminded as we see the beauty
21 in our state chamber, in this Senate, pictured
22 above the Senate podium between Lady Liberty
23 and Lady Justice.
24 O God, You are our Creator, and we
25 ask You to accept this Senate prayer as a
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1 reminder of our commitment to serve You,
2 O Lord.
3 Amen.
4 THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Father
5 Young.
6 Reading of the Journal.
7 THE SECRETARY: In Senate,
8 Monday, June 12, the Senate met pursuant to
9 adjournment. The Journal of Sunday, June 11,
10 was read and approved. On motion, Senate
11 adjourned.
12 THE PRESIDENT: Without
13 objection, the Journal stands approved as
14 read.
15 Presentation of petitions.
16 Messages from the Assembly.
17 Messages from the Governor.
18 Reports of standing committees.
19 Reports of select committees.
20 Communications and reports from
21 state officers.
22 Motions and resolutions.
23 Senator Fuschillo.
24 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Madam
25 President, on behalf of Senator Johnson,
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1 please place a sponsor's star on Calendar
2 Number 1662.
3 THE PRESIDENT: So ordered.
4 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: On behalf of
5 Senator Larkin, I wish to call up Senate Print
6 Number 7156, recalled from the Assembly, which
7 is now at the desk.
8 THE PRESIDENT: The Secretary
9 will read.
10 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
11 1528, by Senator Larkin, Senate Print 7156, an
12 act to authorize the City of Kingston.
13 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
14 Fuschillo.
15 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: I now move
16 reconsider the vote by which the bill was
17 passed.
18 THE PRESIDENT: The Secretary
19 will call the roll upon reconsideration.
20 (The Secretary called the roll.)
21 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 41.
22 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: I now offer
23 the following amendments.
24 THE PRESIDENT: The amendments
25 are received.
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1 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: On behalf of
2 Senator Morahan, on page number 13 I offer the
3 following amendments to Calendar Number 349,
4 Senate Print Number 5340, and ask that said
5 bill retain its place on Third Reading
6 Calendar.
7 THE PRESIDENT: The amendments
8 are received, and the bill will retain its
9 place on the Third Reading Calendar.
10 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: On behalf of
11 Senator Golden, on page number 36 I offer the
12 following amendments to Calendar Number 888,
13 Senate Print Number 1823 and ask that said
14 bill retain its place on Third Reading
15 Calendar.
16 THE PRESIDENT: The amendments
17 are received. The bill will retain its place
18 on the Third Reading Calendar.
19 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: On behalf of
20 Senator Volker, on page number 66 I offer the
21 following amendments to Calendar Number 1409,
22 Senate Print Number 6748, and ask that said
23 bill retain its place on Third Reading
24 Calendar.
25 THE PRESIDENT: The amendments
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1 are received, and that bill will retain its
2 place on the Third Reading Calendar.
3 Senator Fuschillo.
4 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Are there any
5 substitutions at the desk?
6 THE PRESIDENT: Yes, there are.
7 The Secretary will read.
8 THE SECRETARY: On page 7,
9 Senator Alesi moves to discharge, from the
10 Committee on Corporations, Authorities and
11 Commissions, Assembly Bill Number 727 and
12 substitute it for the identical Senate Bill
13 Number 1318, Third Reading Calendar 198.
14 On page 14, Senator Maziarz moves
15 to discharge, from the Committee on
16 Transportation, Assembly Bill Number 8544B and
17 substitute it for the identical Senate Bill
18 Number 5658B, Third Reading Calendar 388.
19 On page 48, Senator LaValle moves
20 to discharge, from the Committee on Higher
21 Education, Assembly Bill Number 8721A and
22 substitute it for the identical Senate Bill
23 Number 843B, Third Reading Calendar 1122.
24 On page 52, Senator Marcellino
25 moves to discharge, from the Committee on
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1 Consumer Protection, Assembly Bill Number
2 3255A and substitute it for the identical
3 Senate Bill Number 2472A, Third Reading
4 Calendar 1187.
5 On page 53, Senator Nozzolio moves
6 to discharge, from the Committee on Rules,
7 Assembly Bill Number 2472A and substitute it
8 for the identical Senate Bill Number 511A,
9 Third Reading Calendar 1203.
10 On page 59, Senator Fuschillo moves
11 to discharge, from the Committee on Insurance,
12 Assembly Bill Number 632 and substitute it for
13 the identical Senate Bill Number 1774, Third
14 Reading Calendar 1316.
15 On page 76, Senator Little moves to
16 discharge, from the Committee on Local
17 Government, Assembly Bill Number 10473 and
18 substitute it for the identical Senate Bill
19 Number 7700, Third Reading Calendar 1543.
20 On page 76, Senator Little moves to
21 discharge, from the Committee on Local
22 Government, Assembly Bill Number 10482 and
23 substitute it for the identical Senate Bill
24 Number 7736, Third Reading Calendar 1544.
25 On page 76, Senator Little moves to
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1 discharge, from the Committee on Local
2 Government, Assembly Bill Number 10474 and
3 substitute it for the identical Senate Bill
4 Number 7739, Third Reading Calendar 1545.
5 On page 79, Senator Bruno moves to
6 discharge, from the Committee on Local
7 Government, Assembly Bill Number 8760 and
8 substitute it for the identical Senate Bill
9 Number 5180, Third Reading Calendar 1601.
10 On page 80, Senator Volker moves to
11 discharge, from the Committee on Rules,
12 Assembly Bill Number 9620 and substitute it
13 for the identical Senate Bill Number 6430,
14 Third Reading Calendar 1606.
15 On page 80, Senator Leibell moves
16 to discharge, from the Committee on Local
17 Government, Assembly Bill Number 9619 and
18 substitute it for the identical Senate Bill
19 Number 6515, Third Reading Calendar 1607.
20 And on page 80, Senator Bonacic
21 moves to discharge, from the Committee on
22 Local Government, Assembly Bill Number 10740B
23 and substitute it for the identical Senate
24 Bill Number 6953A, Third Reading Calendar
25 1616.
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1 THE PRESIDENT: Substitutions
2 ordered.
3 Senator Fuschillo.
4 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Madam
5 President, may we please adopt the Resolution
6 Calendar.
7 THE PRESIDENT: All in favor of
8 adopting the Resolution Calendar please
9 signify by saying aye.
10 (Response of "Aye.")
11 THE PRESIDENT: Opposed, nay.
12 (No response.)
13 THE PRESIDENT: The Resolution
14 Calendar is adopted.
15 Senator Fuschillo.
16 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Thank you,
17 Madam President.
18 May we please have the
19 noncontroversial reading of the calendar.
20 THE PRESIDENT: The Secretary
21 will read.
22 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
23 109, by Senator Robach, Senate Print 3331, an
24 act to amend the Civil Service Law.
25 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
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1 section.
2 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
3 act shall take effect immediately.
4 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
5 (The Secretary called the roll.)
6 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 41.
7 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
8 passed.
9 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
10 170, by Senator Marcellino, Senate Print --
11 SENATOR MARCELLINO: Lay it aside
12 for the day.
13 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is laid
14 aside for the day.
15 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
16 198, substituted earlier by Member of the
17 Assembly Sweeney, Assembly Print Number 727,
18 an act to amend the Urban Development
19 Corporation Act.
20 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
21 section.
22 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
23 act shall take effect immediately.
24 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
25 (The Secretary called the roll.)
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1 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 41.
2 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
3 passed.
4 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
5 281, by Senator Farley, Senate Print 5806A, an
6 act to amend the Banking Law.
7 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
8 section.
9 THE SECRETARY: Section 5. This
10 act shall take effect immediately.
11 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
12 (The Secretary called the roll.)
13 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 41.
14 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
15 passed.
16 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
17 335, by Senator Spano, Senate Print 2271B, an
18 act to amend the Executive Law.
19 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
20 section.
21 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
22 act shall take effect immediately.
23 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
24 (The Secretary called the roll.)
25 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 41.
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1 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
2 passed.
3 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
4 342, by Senator Winner, Senate Print 6448B, an
5 act to amend the Tax Law.
6 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
7 section.
8 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
9 act shall take effect immediately.
10 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
11 (The Secretary called the roll.)
12 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 41.
13 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
14 passed.
15 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
16 358, by Senator Alesi, Senate Print 6612, an
17 act to amend the Tax Law.
18 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
19 section.
20 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
21 act shall take effect April 1, 2006.
22 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
23 (The Secretary called the roll.)
24 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 42.
25 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
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1 passed.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 388 --
4 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Lay it aside
5 for the day.
6 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is laid
7 aside for the day.
8 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
9 455, by Senator Volker, Senate Print 2727, an
10 act to amend the Criminal Procedure Law.
11 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
12 section.
13 THE SECRETARY: Section 5. This
14 act shall take effect --
15 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Lay it
16 aside.
17 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is laid
18 aside.
19 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
20 460, by Senator Golden --
21 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Lay it
22 aside.
23 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is laid
24 aside.
25 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
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1 468, by Senator Balboni, Senate Print 6913A,
2 an act to amend the Executive Law.
3 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
4 section.
5 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Lay it aside
6 temporarily.
7 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is laid
8 aside temporarily.
9 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
10 504, by Senator Skelos, Senate Print 6872B --
11 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Lay it
12 aside.
13 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is laid
14 aside.
15 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
16 667, by Senator Marchi, Senate Print 5418A, an
17 act to amend the Vehicle and Traffic Law.
18 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
19 section.
20 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
21 act shall take effect immediately.
22 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
23 (The Secretary called the roll.)
24 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 42.
25 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
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1 passed.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 710, by Senator Larkin, Senate Print 2349, an
4 act to amend the Racing, Pari-Mutuel Wagering
5 and Breeding Law.
6 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
7 section.
8 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
9 act shall take effect immediately.
10 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
11 (The Secretary called the roll.)
12 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 42.
13 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
14 passed.
15 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
16 777, by Senator Marcellino, Senate Print
17 2851A, an act to amend the Executive Law.
18 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
19 section.
20 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
21 act shall take effect on the 60th day.
22 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
23 (The Secretary called the roll.)
24 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 42.
25 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
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1 passed.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 820, by Senator Padavan, Senate Print 319, an
4 act to amend the Real Property Law.
5 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
6 section.
7 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
8 act shall take effect immediately.
9 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
10 (The Secretary called the roll.)
11 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 43.
12 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
13 passed.
14 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
15 829, by Senator DeFrancisco, Senate Print
16 6844, an act to amend the Family Court Act.
17 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
18 section.
19 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
20 act shall take effect on the 90th day.
21 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
22 (The Secretary called the roll.)
23 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 43.
24 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
25 passed.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
2 855, by Senator --
3 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Lay it aside
4 for the day.
5 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is laid
6 aside for the day.
7 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
8 858, by Senator Nozzolio, Senate Print 7234A,
9 an act to amend the Real Property Tax Law.
10 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
11 section.
12 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
13 act shall take effect immediately.
14 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
15 (The Secretary called the roll.)
16 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 43.
17 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
18 passed.
19 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
20 859, by Senator Saland, Senate Print 458, an
21 act to amend the Judiciary Law and the Uniform
22 City Court Act.
23 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
24 section.
25 THE SECRETARY: Section 4. This
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1 act shall take effect immediately.
2 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
3 (The Secretary called the roll.)
4 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 43.
5 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
6 passed.
7 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
8 864, by Senator Farley, Senate Print 7585A, an
9 act to amend the Uniform City Court Act and
10 the Judiciary Law.
11 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
12 section.
13 THE SECRETARY: Section 4. This
14 act shall take effect on the 60th day.
15 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
16 (The Secretary called the roll.)
17 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 43.
18 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
19 passed.
20 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
21 954, by Senator Trunzo, Senate Print 133A, an
22 act in relation to directing.
23 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
24 section.
25 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
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1 act shall take effect immediately.
2 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
3 (The Secretary called the roll.)
4 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 43.
5 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
6 passed.
7 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
8 963, by Senator Wright, Senate Print 4268, an
9 act to amend the Executive Law.
10 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
11 section.
12 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
13 act shall take effect immediately.
14 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
15 (The Secretary called the roll.)
16 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 44.
17 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
18 passed.
19 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
20 1003, by Senator Balboni, Senate Print 6822A,
21 an act to amend the Waterfront Commission Act.
22 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
23 section.
24 THE SECRETARY: Section 6. This
25 act shall take effect upon enactment into law
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1 by the State of New Jersey.
2 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
3 (The Secretary called the roll.)
4 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 44.
5 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
6 passed.
7 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
8 1007, by Senator Leibell, Senate Print 7711,
9 an act to amend Chapter 882 of the Laws of
10 1953.
11 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
12 section.
13 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
14 act shall take effect upon enactment into law
15 by the State of New Jersey.
16 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
17 (The Secretary called the roll.)
18 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 44.
19 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
20 passed.
21 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
22 1014, by Senator Balboni, Senate Print 7229,
23 an act to amend the Insurance Law.
24 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
25 section.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
2 act shall take effect on the 120th day.
3 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
4 (The Secretary called the roll.)
5 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 44.
6 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
7 passed.
8 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
9 1024, by Senator Young, Senate Print 7828, an
10 act to amend the Agriculture and Markets Law.
11 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
12 section.
13 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
14 act shall take effect immediately.
15 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
16 (The Secretary called the roll.)
17 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 44.
18 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
19 passed.
20 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
21 1041, by Senator Wright, Senate Print 2473, an
22 act to amend the Penal Law.
23 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
24 section.
25 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
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1 act shall take effect on the first of
2 November.
3 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
4 (The Secretary called the roll.)
5 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 44.
6 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
7 passed.
8 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
9 1045, by Senator Young, Senate Print 6276 --
10 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Lay it
11 aside.
12 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is laid
13 aside.
14 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
15 1065, by Senator Trunzo, Senate Print 6745, an
16 act to amend the Vehicle and Traffic Law.
17 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
18 section.
19 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
20 act shall take effect immediately.
21 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
22 (The Secretary called the roll.)
23 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 44.
24 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
25 passed.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
2 1073, by Senator Marchi, Senate Print 2566A,
3 an act to amend the Retirement and Social
4 Security Law.
5 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
6 section.
7 THE SECRETARY: Section 11. This
8 act shall take effect on the first of April
9 next succeeding.
10 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
11 (The Secretary called the roll.)
12 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 44.
13 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
14 passed.
15 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
16 1082, by Senator Padavan, Senate Print 7831,
17 an act to amend the Civil Service Law.
18 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
19 section.
20 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
21 act shall take effect immediately.
22 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
23 (The Secretary called the roll.)
24 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 44.
25 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
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1 passed.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 1102, by Senator Trunzo, Senate Print 129, an
4 act to amend the Real Property Tax Law.
5 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
6 section.
7 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
8 act shall take effect immediately.
9 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
10 (The Secretary called the roll.)
11 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 46.
12 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
13 passed.
14 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
15 1104, by Senator LaValle, Senate Print 1392,
16 an act to amend Chapter 311 of the Laws of
17 1920.
18 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
19 section.
20 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
21 act shall take effect immediately.
22 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
23 (The Secretary called the roll.)
24 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 46.
25 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
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1 passed.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 1122, substituted earlier today by the
4 Assembly Committee on Rules, Assembly Print
5 Number 8721A, an act to amend the Education
6 Law.
7 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
8 section.
9 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
10 act shall take effect on the 90th day.
11 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
12 (The Secretary called the roll.)
13 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 46.
14 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
15 passed.
16 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
17 1141, by Senator Leibell, Senate Print 4581A,
18 an act to amend the Surrogate's Court
19 Procedure Act.
20 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
21 section.
22 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
23 act shall take effect January 1, 2007.
24 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
25 (The Secretary called the roll.)
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1 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 48.
2 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
3 passed.
4 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
5 1147, by Senator Hannon, Senate Print 6884, an
6 act to amend the Lien Law.
7 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
8 section.
9 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
10 act shall take effect immediately.
11 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
12 (The Secretary called the roll.)
13 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 47. Nays,
14 1. Senator Winner recorded in the negative.
15 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
16 passed.
17 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
18 1159, by Senator Johnson, Senate Print 244, an
19 act to amend the Executive Law.
20 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
21 section.
22 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
23 act shall take effect immediately.
24 THE PRESIDENT: Call the roll.
25 (The Secretary called the roll.)
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1 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 47. Nays,
2 1. Senator Duane recorded in the negative.
3 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is
4 passed.
5 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
6 1166, by Senator LaValle, Senate Print 1557A,
7 an act to amend the Tax Law.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
9 the last section.
10 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
11 act shall take effect immediately.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
13 the roll.
14 (The Secretary called the roll.)
15 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 47. Nays,
16 1. Senator Duane recorded in the negative.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
18 bill is passed.
19 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
20 1187, substituted earlier today by Member of
21 the Assembly DiNapoli, Assembly Print Number
22 3255A, an act to amend the General Business
23 Law.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
25 the last section.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
2 act shall take effect on the first of January.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
4 the roll.
5 (The Secretary called the roll.)
6 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 48.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
8 bill is passed.
9 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
10 1203, substituted earlier today by Member of
11 the Assembly Oaks, Assembly Print Number
12 2472A, an act to amend the Criminal Procedure
13 Law.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
15 the last section.
16 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
17 act shall take effect on the first of
18 November.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
20 the roll.
21 (The Secretary called the roll.)
22 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 47. Nays,
23 1. Senator Duane recorded in the negative.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
25 bill is passed.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
2 1221, by Senator Farley, Senate Print 7427, an
3 act to amend the Criminal Procedure Law.
4 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
5 the last section.
6 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
7 act shall take effect immediately.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
9 the roll.
10 (The Secretary called the roll.)
11 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 47. Nays,
12 1. Senator Duane recorded in the negative.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
14 bill is passed.
15 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
16 1223, by Senator LaValle, Senate Print 1365D,
17 an act to amend the Environmental Conservation
18 Law.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
20 the last section.
21 THE SECRETARY: Section 28. This
22 act shall take effect immediately.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
24 the roll.
25 (The Secretary called the roll.)
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1 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 48.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
3 bill is passed.
4 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
5 1230, by Senator Volker, Senate Print 6757B,
6 an act to amend the Environmental Conservation
7 Law.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
9 the last section.
10 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
11 act shall take effect immediately.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
13 the roll.
14 (The Secretary called the roll.)
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
16 Serrano, to explain his vote.
17 SENATOR SERRANO: Thank you,
18 Mr. President.
19 I will continue to vote no on
20 hunting bills such as this. I think it sends
21 the wrong message to the youth of this state
22 to engage in violence of this nature towards
23 animals. I think it's a very unsafe practice,
24 and there's been numerous high-profile hunting
25 accidents that we've been reading about.
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1 I think that this is an area where
2 we should be educating our citizens and the
3 youth of our state to be kind towards animals
4 and to coexist peacefully with them, and I
5 think that this bill sends the wrong message.
6 So I will continue to vote no. I vote no on
7 this bill.
8 Thank you.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
10 Serrano in the negative.
11 Announce the results.
12 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 46. Nays,
13 2. Senators Duane and Serrano recorded in the
14 negative.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
16 bill is passed.
17 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
18 1261, by Senator Bonacic, Senate Print 269, an
19 act to amend the Social Services Law.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
21 the last section.
22 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
23 act shall take effect on the 120th day.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
25 the roll.
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1 (The Secretary called the roll.)
2 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 48.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
4 bill is passed.
5 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
6 1278, by Senator Marcellino, Senate Print
7 6736, an act in relation to authorizing.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: There
9 is a home-rule message at the desk.
10 Read the last section.
11 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
12 act shall take effect immediately.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
14 the roll.
15 (The Secretary called the roll.)
16 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 49.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
18 bill is passed.
19 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
20 1284, by Senator Saland, Senate Print 7328, an
21 act to amend the Town Law.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: A
23 home-rule message is at the desk.
24 Read the last section.
25 THE SECRETARY: Section 4. This
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1 act shall take effect immediately.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
3 the roll.
4 (The Secretary called the roll.)
5 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
6 Hassell-Thompson, to explain her vote.
7 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Thank
8 you, Mr. President.
9 I commend Senator Saland on his
10 passage of this bill for Red Hook. But I
11 would like to hope that he would or someone
12 would include a land preservation act like
13 this for the entire state.
14 I will support the bill.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH:
16 Announce the results.
17 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 49.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
19 bill is passed.
20 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
21 1287, by Senator Farley, Senate Print 4047A,
22 an act to amend the Banking Law.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
24 the last section.
25 THE SECRETARY: Section 4. This
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1 act shall take effect immediately.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
3 the roll.
4 (The Secretary called the roll.)
5 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 49.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
7 bill is passed.
8 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
9 1316, substituted earlier today by Member of
10 the Assembly Pheffer, Assembly Print Number
11 632, an act to amend the Insurance Law.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
13 the last section.
14 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
15 act shall take effect on the 120th day.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
17 the roll.
18 (The Secretary called the roll.)
19 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 49.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
21 bill is passed.
22 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
23 1369, by Senator --
24 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Lay it
25 aside.
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1 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Lay it aside
2 for the day.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
4 bill is laid aside for the day.
5 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
6 1380, by Senator Maziarz --
7 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Lay it
8 aside.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
10 bill is laid aside.
11 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
12 1383, by Senator Stachowski, Senate Print
13 2485, an act to amend the Penal Law.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
15 the last section.
16 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
17 act shall take effect on the first of
18 November.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
20 the roll.
21 (The Secretary called the roll.)
22 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 49.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
24 bill is passed.
25 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Mr.
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1 President.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
3 Fuschillo.
4 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Calendar
5 Number 468 was laid aside temporarily. Will
6 you please take it up.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
8 Secretary will read.
9 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
10 468, by Senator Balboni, Senate Print 6913A,
11 an act to amend the Executive Law.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
13 the last section.
14 THE SECRETARY: Section 4. This
15 act shall take effect on the first of January.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
17 the roll.
18 (The Secretary called the roll.)
19 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
20 Balboni, to explain his vote.
21 SENATOR BALBONI: Yes,
22 Mr. President. Thank you very much for giving
23 me the opportunity to explain my vote.
24 I notice that in the chamber today
25 we have several young people, who probably
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1 understand this bill better than anybody. All
2 of us who have pets, this bill is about
3 creating a system for emergency shelters for
4 pets.
5 One of the most enduring images
6 from the Katrina catastrophe was somebody
7 standing on their stoop with their dog and
8 people in a boat driving by and saying, "Get
9 in the boat." And him saying, "I'm not going
10 to go without my dog."
11 And if you take a look at the
12 emergency plans for the State of New York, you
13 realize there's absolutely no provision for
14 pet-friendly shelters.
15 This bill, which I'm pleased to say
16 is going to be a law because it's passed in
17 the Assembly, is going to create a system for
18 pet-friendly shelters. So hopefully we'll
19 never see in New York State, if we have a
20 catastrophe, what we saw in New Orleans.
21 I vote aye, Mr. President. Thank
22 you.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Thank
24 you, Senator Balboni. You will be recorded in
25 the affirmative.
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1 Announce the results.
2 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 49.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
4 bill is passed.
5 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
6 1388, by Senator Morahan, Senate Print 4163,
7 an act to amend the Criminal Procedure Law.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
9 the last section.
10 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
11 act shall take effect immediately.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
13 the roll.
14 (The Secretary called the roll.)
15 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 49.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
17 bill is passed.
18 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
19 1399, by Senator Fuschillo, Senate Print 2275,
20 an act to amend the Vehicle and Traffic Law.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
22 the last section.
23 THE SECRETARY: Section 6. This
24 act shall take effect on the first of
25 November.
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1 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
2 the roll.
3 (The Secretary called the roll.)
4 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
6 bill is passed.
7 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
8 1440, by Senator Skelos, Senate Print 4670A,
9 an act to amend the Retirement and Social
10 Security Law.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
12 the last section.
13 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
14 act shall take effect immediately.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
16 the roll.
17 (The Secretary called the roll.)
18 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
20 bill is passed.
21 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
22 1475, by Senator Spano, Senate Print 4494, an
23 act to amend Chapter 481 of the Laws of 1967.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
25 the last section.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
2 act shall take effect immediately.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
4 the roll.
5 (The Secretary called the roll.)
6 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
8 bill is passed.
9 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
10 1496, by Senator Winner, Senate Print 6447B,
11 an act to amend the Tax Law.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
13 the last section.
14 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
15 act shall take effect immediately.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
17 the roll.
18 (The Secretary called the roll.)
19 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
21 bill is passed.
22 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
23 1543, substituted earlier today by Member of
24 the Assembly Sweeney, Assembly Print Number
25 10473, an act to amend the General Municipal
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1 Law.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
3 the last section.
4 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
5 act shall take effect on the 180th day.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
7 the roll.
8 (The Secretary called the roll.)
9 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 52.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
11 bill is passed.
12 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
13 1544, substituted earlier today by Member of
14 the Assembly Ramos, Assembly Print Number
15 10482, an act to amend the Town Law.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
17 the last section.
18 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
19 act shall take effect January 1, 2007.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
21 the roll.
22 (The Secretary called the roll.)
23 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 52.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
25 bill is passed.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
2 1545, substituted earlier by Member of the
3 Assembly Sweeney, Assembly Print Number 10474,
4 an act to amend the General Municipal Law.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
6 the last section.
7 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
8 act shall take effect January 1, 2007.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
10 the roll.
11 (The Secretary called the roll.)
12 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 52.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
14 bill is passed.
15 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
16 1578, by Senator LaValle, Senate Print 1721B,
17 an act to amend the Education Law.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
19 the last section.
20 THE SECRETARY: Section 4. This
21 act shall take effect on the first of July.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
23 the roll.
24 (The Secretary called the roll.)
25 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 52.
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1 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
2 bill is passed.
3 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
4 1584, by Senator Trunzo, Senate Print 198, an
5 act to amend the Public Authorities Law.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
7 the last section.
8 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
9 act shall take effect immediately.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
11 the roll.
12 (The Secretary called the roll.)
13 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 52.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
15 bill is passed.
16 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
17 1586, by Senator Padavan, Senate Print 1263,
18 an act to amend the Criminal Procedure Law.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
20 the last section.
21 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
22 act shall take effect on the 90th day.
23 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Lay it
24 aside.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
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1 bill is laid aside.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 1594, by Senator Alesi, Senate Print --
4 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Lay it aside
5 for the day.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
7 bill is laid aside for the day.
8 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
9 1595, by Senator Rath, Senate Print 3927A, an
10 act to amend the Tax Law.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
12 the last section.
13 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
14 act shall take effect on the first of April.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
16 the roll.
17 (The Secretary called the roll.)
18 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51. Nays,
19 1. Senator Duane recorded in the negative.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
21 bill is passed.
22 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
23 1598, by Senator Leibell, Senate Print 4722,
24 an act to amend the Public Authorities Law.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
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1 the last section.
2 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
3 act shall take effect on the 90th day.
4 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
5 the roll.
6 (The Secretary called the roll.)
7 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51. Nays,
8 2. Senators Duane and Parker recorded in the
9 negative.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
11 bill is passed.
12 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
13 1599, by Senator Little, Senate Print 4912B,
14 an act to grant Christopher Paiser performance
15 of duty disability retirement benefits.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
17 the last section.
18 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
19 act shall take effect immediately.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
21 the roll.
22 (The Secretary called the roll.)
23 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 53.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
25 bill is passed.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
2 1600, by Senator Rath, Senate Print 4936A, an
3 act to amend the Correction Law.
4 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
5 the last section.
6 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
7 act shall take effect on the first of
8 November.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
10 the roll.
11 (The Secretary called the roll.)
12 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 54.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
14 bill is passed.
15 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
16 1601, substituted earlier today by the
17 Assembly Committee on Rules, Assembly Print
18 Number 8760, an act authorizing the assessor
19 of the Town of Delaware.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
21 the last section.
22 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
23 act shall take effect immediately.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
25 the roll.
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1 (The Secretary called the roll.)
2 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 55.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
4 bill is passed.
5 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
6 1602, by Senator Flanagan, Senate Print 5231A,
7 an act to amend the Correction Law.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
9 the last section.
10 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
11 act shall take effect immediately.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
13 the roll.
14 (The Secretary called the roll.)
15 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
17 bill is passed.
18 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
19 1603, by Senator Volker, Senate Print 5681A,
20 an act to amend the Tax Law.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
22 the last section.
23 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
24 act shall take effect on the first of January.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
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1 the roll.
2 (The Secretary called the roll.)
3 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
4 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
5 bill is passed.
6 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
7 1604, by Senator Duane, Senate Print 5772, an
8 act to amend the Criminal Procedure Law.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
10 the last section.
11 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
12 act shall take effect immediately.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
14 the roll.
15 (The Secretary called the roll.)
16 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
18 bill is passed.
19 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
20 1605, by Senator Larkin, Senate Print 6008, an
21 act to amend the Social Services Law and the
22 Real Property Tax Law.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
24 the last section.
25 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
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1 act shall take effect immediately.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
3 the roll.
4 (The Secretary called the roll.)
5 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 55. Nays,
6 1. Senator Duane recorded in the negative.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
8 bill is passed.
9 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
10 1606, substituted earlier by Member of the
11 Assembly Burling, Assembly Print Number 9620,
12 an act in relation to granting.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: A
14 home-rule message is at the desk.
15 Read the last section.
16 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
17 act shall take effect immediately.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
19 the roll.
20 (The Secretary called the roll.)
21 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
23 bill is passed.
24 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
25 1607, substituted earlier by Member of the
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1 Assembly Bradley, Assembly Print Number 9619,
2 an act to amend the Real Property Tax Law.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
4 the last section.
5 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
6 act shall take effect on the first of January.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
8 the roll.
9 (The Secretary called the roll.)
10 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
12 bill is passed.
13 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
14 1613, by Senator Winner, Senate Print 6816, an
15 act to amend the New York State Urban
16 Development Corporation Act.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
18 the last section.
19 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
20 act shall take effect immediately.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
22 the roll.
23 (The Secretary called the roll.)
24 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
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1 bill is passed.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 1614, by Senator Young, Senate Print 6819, an
4 act to amend the Tax Law.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: There
6 is a local fiscal impact note at the desk.
7 Read the last section.
8 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
9 act shall take effect immediately.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
11 the roll.
12 (The Secretary called the roll.)
13 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
15 bill is passed.
16 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
17 1616, substituted earlier today by Member of
18 the Assembly Cahill, Assembly Print Number
19 10740B, an act to amend the Real Property Tax
20 Law.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
22 the last section.
23 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
24 act shall take effect on the first of January.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
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1 the roll.
2 (The Secretary called the roll.)
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
4 Breslin, to explain his vote.
5 SENATOR BRESLIN: Thank you very
6 much, Mr. President.
7 I concur with this bill by Senator
8 Bonacic. I have a similar bill that hopefully
9 will be taken up.
10 As you know, firefighters
11 throughout this state are diminishing in
12 numbers, and we have to create incentives to
13 allow participation by volunteer firefighters.
14 And accordingly, I vote yea.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Thank
16 you, Senator Breslin. You will be recorded in
17 the affirmative.
18 Announce the results.
19 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
21 bill is passed.
22 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
23 1617, by Senator Morahan, Senate Print 7003,
24 an act to authorize.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: A
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1 home-rule message is at the desk.
2 Read the last section.
3 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
4 act shall take effect immediately.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
6 the roll.
7 (The Secretary called the roll.)
8 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
10 bill is passed.
11 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
12 1618, by Senator Young, Senate Print 7016, an
13 act to exempt.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
15 the last section.
16 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
17 act shall take effect immediately.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
19 the roll.
20 (The Secretary called the roll.)
21 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
23 bill is passed.
24 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
25 1619, by Senator Wright, Senate Print 7022, an
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1 act authorizing the Village of Alexandria Bay.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
3 the last section.
4 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
5 act shall take effect immediately.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
7 the roll.
8 (The Secretary called the roll.)
9 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: There
10 is a home-rule message at the desk.
11 Announce the results.
12 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
14 bill is passed.
15 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
16 1620, by Senator Flanagan, Senate Print 7309,
17 an act to authorize the Town of Smithtown.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: A
19 home-rule message is at the desk.
20 Read the last section.
21 THE SECRETARY: Section 5. This
22 act shall take effect immediately.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
24 the roll.
25 (The Secretary called the roll.)
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1 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
3 bill is passed.
4 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
5 1621, by Senator Marcellino, Senate Print
6 7333A, an act to authorize.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
8 the last section.
9 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
10 act shall take effect immediately.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
12 the roll.
13 (The Secretary called the roll.)
14 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
16 bill is passed.
17 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
18 1622, by Senator Morahan, Senate Print 7843,
19 an act to amend the Penal Law and others.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Read
21 the last section.
22 THE SECRETARY: Section 60. This
23 act shall take effect on the 90th day.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
25 the roll.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 56.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
3 bill is passed.
4 That completes the noncontroversial
5 calendar.
6 Senator Fuschillo.
7 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Mr.
8 President, will you please ring the bells as
9 we proceed to read the controversial calendar.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
11 Secretary will ring the bell to get the
12 members in the chamber.
13 Senator Fuschillo.
14 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Mr.
15 President, if we could start the reading of
16 the controversial calendar with Calendar
17 Number 460, Senator Golden's bill.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
19 Secretary will read.
20 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
21 460, by Senator Golden, Senate Print 6771, an
22 act to amend the Penal Law and the Criminal
23 Procedure Law.
24 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON:
25 Explanation.
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1 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
2 Golden, an explanation has been requested.
3 SENATOR GOLDEN: Thank you,
4 Mr. President.
5 Today we are passing a bill, Number
6 6771, that would reinstate the death
7 penalty -- or I shouldn't say reinstate, but
8 would put the death penalty into effect for
9 those that would kill a police officer or a
10 state trooper, a peace officer, or a person
11 that is employed by the correctional
12 institutions.
13 It also would go after terrorism
14 offenders, criminal possession of chemical
15 weapons and biological weapons offenders, and
16 criminal use of those weapons, both biological
17 and chemical weapons.
18 Today we have in the audience, on
19 the balcony, Mr. and Mrs. Corr. Joseph Corr
20 was their son, who was gunned down here in the
21 state of New York at the age of 30.
22 This bill would allow for us to put
23 into place a death penalty for those that
24 would intentionally kill a peace officer,
25 correctional officer, or police officer,
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1 pursuant to the provisions of the current law.
2 Section 4 of this bill also amends
3 the provision of the current law to permit the
4 imposition by the jury of the death penalty
5 upon a person convicted in murder in the first
6 degree of a police officer, peace officer, or
7 an employee of the Department of Correctional
8 Services.
9 We need this law, and I would hope
10 that my colleagues would join me on both sides
11 of the room in voting for this law, so that we
12 can send a message across this state that we
13 are not going to put up with people killing
14 and murdering our officers here in the city
15 and state of New York.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Thank
17 you, Senator Golden.
18 Senator Diaz.
19 SENATOR DIAZ: Thank you,
20 Mr. President.
21 Through you, Mr. President, would
22 the sponsor yield for a question or two.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
24 Golden, will you yield?
25 SENATOR GOLDEN: Yes, I do.
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1 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH:
2 Continue.
3 SENATOR DIAZ: Senator Golden,
4 this bill only includes people that kill
5 police officers, correctional officers, and
6 peace officers. Why do you not include people
7 that kill senior citizens, bodegueros, taxi
8 drivers or men and women that kills their
9 respective spouses or their children? How
10 come they were not included there?
11 SENATOR GOLDEN: Senator,
12 unfortunately we do need an expanded death
13 penalty. And I believe Dale Volker's bill
14 will be coming up, and hopefully you will vote
15 for that bill if you will not vote for this
16 bill.
17 But we believe, we're looking at a
18 bill passed here in the State Senate, and in
19 the State Assembly that the Assembly itself
20 will see the value in passing a bill that
21 would protect and give the tools to our police
22 officers and our state troopers, our peace
23 officers and others here in the state of
24 New York.
25 If they would not, these criminals
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1 today, if they have no respect for that thin
2 blue line, that thin line that protects us and
3 keeps us between civility and anarchy, and
4 they would gun down a police officer
5 intentionally and kill that police officer,
6 what does your life or the life of a senior
7 citizen or the life of a child mean to them?
8 It means nothing. Once you take that life of
9 that officer, you've crossed the line.
10 And it's a message to send to the
11 people here in the State of New York that
12 we're not going to put up with it.
13 SENATOR DIAZ: Through you,
14 Mr. President, will the sponsor yield for
15 another question.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
17 Golden, will you continue to yield?
18 SENATOR GOLDEN: I do.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH:
20 Continue.
21 SENATOR DIAZ: Senator Golden, do
22 you think that the life of a senior citizen, a
23 battered woman, or a child killed by a child
24 abuser has less value than a police officer or
25 a correctional officer or a peace officer?
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1 SENATOR GOLDEN: Senator Diaz,
2 walk away from your talking points and speak
3 to the actions of what's going on here in the
4 city and state of New York.
5 Between June and December of last
6 year, we had nine police officers gunned down.
7 We had four killed last year. We have another
8 two killed this year. We had scores wounded.
9 We have an Elmira police officer, Sean Brown,
10 who was gunned down over the weekend, was shot
11 in the stomach. Thank God he's still alive.
12 I'm saying that we can't get a bill
13 passed that you want, that your colleagues in
14 the Assembly and you and your side will not
15 pass that law, the one that would enhance all
16 of those -- senior citizens, children, and
17 people that we should have a death penalty
18 for.
19 But I'm saying here's a bill that
20 you can support, here's a bill that the Senate
21 and the Assembly can support for that parent
22 up there that lost their son that was gunned
23 down here in the state of New York and for the
24 police officers across this city and state of
25 New York, that that is the thin blue line that
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1 we are going to protect.
2 That thin blue line is the
3 difference between civility and anarchy. And
4 if you're going to cross the line there,
5 there's not much that a child or a senior
6 citizen's life cares about. They don't care.
7 So do the right thing, Senator, and
8 support us on this bill.
9 SENATOR DIAZ: Mr. President,
10 through you, will the sponsor yield for
11 another question.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
13 Golden, will you yield for another question?
14 SENATOR GOLDEN: I certainly
15 will.
16 SENATOR DIAZ: I admire your
17 emotion and I admire your passion. And I see
18 all the people, wherever, you're saying
19 that -- yes, my daughter, my daughter is a
20 police officer, a sergeant in the City of
21 New York. But, Senator, you know, I know that
22 police officers have been killed. And I
23 sympathize with the family of the police
24 officer here.
25 But I assure you, with all the
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1 passion and all the emotion that you are
2 talking about, that there are more -- senior
3 citizens, bodegueros, taxi drivers are being
4 killed in masses. And they deserve to be
5 respected too, they deserve to be considered
6 too, because they are senior citizens with no
7 one to protect them. So I wish you'd use the
8 same passion and the same emotion that you're
9 using to protect senior citizens too.
10 But my question is this, Senator.
11 If a person sits down to plan a robbery in a
12 bodega, or a taxi driver, and that person, he
13 or she buys a gun, a firearm, loads that
14 firearm and goes into a bodega or to a senior
15 citizen's home or to a taxi driver to rob
16 those people, and in that process that person
17 takes the life away of a senior citizen, of a
18 bodeguero, is that a premeditated murder to
19 you, yes or no? Yes or no.
20 SENATOR GOLDEN: Senator Diaz,
21 the answer is yes.
22 I believe, and I'm hoping that
23 you're telling me, that not only will you
24 support my bill for those that the death of a
25 police officer -- that would kill a police
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1 officer here in the city and state of
2 New York, but that you will support Senator
3 Volker's bill that deals exactly with that
4 issue.
5 Will you vote for Senator Volker's
6 bill that deals with killing that senior
7 citizen, that deals with killing that child,
8 will you vote for that, Senator Diaz?
9 SENATOR DIAZ: Will you --
10 through you, Mr. President.
11 SENATOR GOLDEN: Answer my
12 question, Senator Diaz.
13 SENATOR DIAZ: I'm the one asking
14 the questions here, sir.
15 SENATOR GOLDEN: Senator Diaz,
16 answer my question.
17 SENATOR DIAZ: I'm the one asking
18 the questions here.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
20 Schneiderman, why do you rise?
21 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Point of
22 order.
23 Ladies and gentlemen, this is an
24 emotional issue. We're going to have a long
25 debate today. May I just request that, as per
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1 the rules of this chamber, we speak through
2 the chair when addressing each other, as
3 Senator Diaz is now attempting to do.
4 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Thank
5 you, Senator Schneiderman.
6 Senator Diaz, will you answer the
7 question or not?
8 SENATOR DIAZ: Through you,
9 Mr. President --
10 SENATOR GOLDEN: Mr. President,
11 I've asked the question, Mr. President, and
12 I'd like to get an answer. So could I get
13 that question answered --
14 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
15 Golden is actually --
16 SENATOR DIAZ: Sir, I'm
17 responding to your question, through the
18 President.
19 SENATOR GOLDEN: Thank you, sir.
20 SENATOR DIAZ: I'm Puerto Rican
21 and black, but I know about this business.
22 (Laughter.)
23 SENATOR GOLDEN: And you're a
24 good man.
25 SENATOR DIAZ: We are talking
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1 today not to Senator Volker's bill, we are
2 talking about your bill, the one that you
3 ignore -- the bill that you have ignored to
4 protect senior citizens and charge on children
5 and bodegueros. We're talking about that
6 bill.
7 And now, today, I'm asking you
8 today to that bill. So forget about Senator
9 Volker's bill. Let's concentrate on your
10 bill, because you are the one that have
11 neglected to protect senior citizens. And you
12 are the chairman of the senior citizen
13 committee. I'm talking about that bill.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
15 Diaz, do you have a question?
16 SENATOR DIAZ: He asked me a
17 question. I'm responding to it --
18 SENATOR GOLDEN: Mr. President,
19 I'm waiting for the response to my question.
20 And instead of a response I'm getting a --
21 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Let's
22 have a little order in here.
23 SENATOR DIAZ: Let's have order
24 in here.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
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1 Diaz has the floor. He's asked Senator
2 Golden -- could you rephrase the question,
3 Senator Diaz?
4 SENATOR GOLDEN: Mr. President, I
5 have yet to get an answer to the question that
6 I've asked.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH:
8 Currently he's asked you to yield, Senator
9 Golden. After he asks his question, you can
10 ask your question.
11 SENATOR GOLDEN: I refuse to
12 yield until I get an answer to my question.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Okay.
14 He refuses to yield.
15 SENATOR DIAZ: Oh, Senator
16 Golden. The answer to your question is that I
17 am addressing today your bill.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
19 Diaz, do you yield or do you want to speak on
20 the bill?
21 SENATOR DIAZ: I yield.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: He
23 yields.
24 SENATOR GOLDEN: I'm asking the
25 Senator for an answer to my question. And his
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1 question to me was would I vote for an
2 individual, a senior citizen or a child that
3 was gunned down or killed by a bad guy, a guy
4 that would take a life. And I'd say yes, I
5 would vote for a bill.
6 And I'd asked Senator Diaz, since
7 that is what he's been asking of me and why
8 I'm not putting that bill forward -- and I'm
9 asking of him that Senator Dale Volker is
10 putting that bill forward today, and that we
11 discuss that bill today, that he would vote
12 for that bill.
13 And I'm asking him, since he's
14 asked me about senior citizens and children
15 and I've asked him would he vote for the death
16 penalty, Dale Volker's bill that has senior
17 citizens and children in it, since that is his
18 passion, that he would give me an honest
19 answer that's in his heart and not on his
20 talking papers.
21 SENATOR DIAZ: My turn now?
22 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
23 Diaz, to answer the question.
24 SENATOR DIAZ: Thank you.
25 Senator Golden, when the time comes
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1 for that bill, I will have an answer for that
2 bill. Today, now, right now, we are talking
3 about Bill 460, sponsored by you, Senator
4 Golden, the chairman of the Aging Committee.
5 So when that time comes, I will
6 have an answer to you. But now my answer to
7 you is that is the life of a senior citizen
8 worth less than the life of --
9 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
10 Diaz, are you asking Senator Golden to yield
11 for a question?
12 SENATOR DIAZ: No, Mr.
13 Chairman -- Mr. President, I want to speak on
14 the bill.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Okay.
16 Senator Diaz, on the bill.
17 SENATOR DIAZ: Thank you, sir.
18 SENATOR GOLDEN: I'd like to
19 answer the question. And the answer to my
20 question is --
21 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: I
22 believe you've already answered it, Senator
23 Golden.
24 SENATOR GOLDEN: No, I want to
25 answer it one more time.
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1 So that, Mr. President, I'd like
2 Senator Diaz to understand that I am going to
3 vote for that child or that senior citizen
4 today. I am going to vote for Dale Volker's
5 bill. And I would hope that you would vote
6 for Dale Volker's bill that addresses the
7 death of a senior and the death of a child.
8 But right now I am addressing --
9 SENATOR CONNOR: Point of order,
10 Mr. President.
11 SENATOR GOLDEN: -- my bill,
12 which is that of a police officer that's
13 killed here in the city and state of New York.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
15 Connor.
16 SENATOR GOLDEN: -- and for the
17 police officers across the state and the city
18 of New York.
19 SENATOR CONNOR: Point of order.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: All
21 right, let's get some order in here.
22 SENATOR DIAZ: Mr. President, on
23 the bill.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
25 Diaz has the floor. He is speaking on the
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1 bill. Let's continue there.
2 Thank you, Senator Golden. Senator
3 Diaz, continue.
4 SENATOR GOLDEN: Thank you,
5 Mr. President. Thank you, Senator Diaz.
6 SENATOR DIAZ: Thank you,
7 Mr. President.
8 As the father of a New York City
9 police sergeant, I can sympathize with the
10 pain of the family of any other officer --
11 correction officer, police officer, or peace
12 officer -- who has been killed in the line of
13 duty, knowing that at any time my family could
14 be next. I want to make it clear that I fully
15 support those brave men and women who risk
16 their lives in their daily work.
17 However, saying that, I would like
18 to share with you some of my concern about
19 Senator Golden's legislation. First,
20 according to the statistics reported in the
21 New York Post on Monday, December 19, 2005, in
22 New York City during that year, 2005, there
23 were 509 killings, homicides: 62 percent of
24 those killings were committed with guns,
25 59 percent of the victims, 59 percent of the
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1 victims were blacks; 29 percent were
2 Hispanics; 8 percent of the victims were
3 white.
4 These statistics show that out of
5 509 homicides or killings in New York City in
6 2005, 88 percent of those victims were blacks
7 and Hispanics. These statistics I suppose
8 include grocery store owners and workers of
9 stores called bodegueros. These I suppose
10 include taxi drivers, especially livery car
11 drivers called gypsies. These statistics I
12 suppose include senior citizens, children, and
13 women killed by rapists and every other
14 citizen in the black and the Hispanic
15 community.
16 After reading these statistics, I
17 have to ask myself, Senator Golden and
18 colleagues, I have to ask myself the following
19 question. If black and Hispanics, bodegueros,
20 taxi drivers, children, battered women and
21 senior citizens are the ones getting killed,
22 why support legislation that only applies to
23 that who kill a police officer, a correctional
24 officer, or a peace officer and fails to
25 include the rest of the population?
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1 My daughter, as I said before, is
2 a -- my only daughter is a member of the
3 New York City Police Department. She's a
4 sergeant. And as I said before, at any time,
5 I repeat, my family could be subject to the
6 same suffering of many other families of
7 police officers in the city of New York or
8 anywhere in the state.
9 Nonetheless, I have to ask myself
10 the following question. I have to ask myself
11 if the life of a police officer, a
12 correctional officer or a peace officer is
13 worth more than the life of a bodeguero, than
14 a taxi driver, than a senior citizen, than
15 children or the battered woman or than any
16 other resident of New York State.
17 Are we sending, Senator Golden and
18 fellow colleagues, are we sending a message to
19 criminals out there telling them that if they
20 want to kill someone that they will be better
21 off choosing a bodeguero, a taxi driver, a
22 senior citizen, a child, a battered woman or
23 anybody else because they will be getting less
24 sentence that way?
25 I am in support of legislation that
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1 increases the penalty on anyone that kills or
2 takes the life of a police officer, a
3 correctional officer or a peace officer or
4 anyone else. I believe that if we are going
5 to send a message to criminals out there and
6 we want to stop crime in New York State once
7 and for all, we have to toughen penalties for
8 the killing of anyone.
9 By the way, why should the penalty
10 be for a police officer or a correctional
11 officer or a peace officer that with malice,
12 with abuse, and with neglect takes the life
13 away of a civilian? Would this have been
14 included there?
15 Back on October 12th, Police
16 Officer Brian Conroy shot and killed
17 Mr. Ousmane Zongo. Police Officer Conroy was
18 found guilty of criminally negligent homicide.
19 The penalty given to that police officer for
20 killing a black guy in New York City was five
21 years in prison and 500 hours of community
22 service.
23 Finally, I ask myself, what is our
24 message to New Yorkers? Is it that a police
25 officer and a correctional officer and a peace
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1 officer's life is better than any other life?
2 Ladies and gentlemen, my daughter,
3 as I said before, is a police officer. And I
4 love my daughter. She's my only daughter. I
5 love police officers. And I love correctional
6 officers. And I love peace officers. But I
7 also love unborn babies that are being killed
8 by thousands every day. Those babies are
9 being killed in a premeditated and
10 unconscionable way by the same people that
11 oppose the death penalty for criminals.
12 And here's my answer, my response
13 to Senator Golden's question. And I'm going
14 to close with this. Because I deeply respect
15 life in all shapes or forms, because I do not
16 believe in killing anyone, and because I
17 believe that life is sacred and beautiful and
18 because I don't believe in abortion, for those
19 reasons and for other reasons, I will oppose
20 this legislation and any other legislation to
21 deal with taking life away.
22 Thank you, Mr. President.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
24 Meier.
25 SENATOR MEIER: Thank you,
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1 Mr. President.
2 You know, since I've been here
3 there have been some days that I walk out of
4 the chamber and I shake my head, not believing
5 what I've heard. And this is going to be one
6 of those days.
7 I mean, let's talk about the
8 reality of the bills that are on the floor and
9 why this particular bill is on the floor
10 first. This bill is on the floor dealing
11 particularly with the subject of police
12 officers because the other body so far has
13 shown absolutely no interest in doing anything
14 with the death penalty. Nothing.
15 And so we look around us at what
16 has occurred in this state since just January
17 of this year, nine police shootings, and you
18 have to think in terms of our responsibility
19 to protect the public that maybe we can get
20 something, anything done that the other body
21 will vote on. And so maybe, just maybe we can
22 get something done that addresses the
23 immediate problem of this attack on our police
24 officers. That's why this bill is before us.
25 And maybe -- let's talk about this
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1 business, if you will, that this somehow
2 demeans the lives of other people, that this
3 somehow establishes that police officers'
4 lives are worth more. The first people that I
5 know who would reject that notion that this
6 stands for the proposition that a police
7 officer's life is worth more would be police
8 officers themselves.
9 You know, police officers leave
10 their homes every day, they go out to do a
11 dangerous and uncertain job. And they
12 understand that and they accept it, and they
13 tend to be people who for the most part are
14 pretty humble about it. They don't make a big
15 deal about it. They don't talk about it.
16 They calmly accept it as something that
17 they're sworn to do.
18 And police officers will tell you
19 also that they believe that 99 percent of
20 people in society obey the law, not because
21 they're afraid of police officers but because
22 people understand in our society that you
23 maintain a civil society by respecting each
24 other as people, by respecting each other's
25 property, and by respecting life and by
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1 respecting everyone else's humanity.
2 There's a 1 percent out there, or
3 maybe even less, who have none of that in
4 their hearts, in their minds, or in their
5 souls. There are people out there who believe
6 only in taking care of themselves. There are
7 people out there for whom every decision in
8 life is a calculation about will I get caught
9 and what's going to happen to me.
10 And you know what? When I look at
11 what happened in the town of New Hartford to
12 Joe Corr, let me tell you something. There's
13 a name for people like that, and it's evil.
14 If that's not evil, evil has no name. And
15 that's what this is about.
16 And I see an empty chair on the
17 other side of the aisle. Some things are
18 tough to hear.
19 When someone attacks a police
20 officer, they are not just attacking one
21 person, they are not just attacking one life.
22 They are saying to the rest of people in civil
23 society who obey the law and lead their lives
24 and want everyone else to do the same: You
25 think you're safe? You think we can't get
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1 you? You think we can't hurt your family or
2 your child if we can kill a police officer?
3 That's the message they're sending.
4 And so the response from those of
5 us who have taken an oath of office is to do
6 something about that.
7 You know what? We've heard a lot
8 of talk this year about things that are the
9 responsibility of the state. We hear a lot of
10 talk and a lot of hot air in this town about
11 our responsibility to take care of education,
12 about our responsibility to build roads and
13 bridges, about our responsibility to take care
14 of healthcare, about our responsibility to
15 children and our communities. You want to
16 know something? It's all meaningless, it all
17 means nothing unless people feel safe in their
18 homes and in their communities and in their
19 neighborhoods.
20 And when you permit people to
21 murder a police officer, they cross one of the
22 most fundamental lines that the law draws.
23 They attack not just that police officer, they
24 attack all of us, they attack the very
25 underpinnings of civil society itself, and
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1 they say to you and to us, Your laws mean
2 nothing.
3 The response in Senator Golden's
4 bill is one that is dictated by the
5 circumstances we find ourselves in this town
6 and the attitude of the other body. It is a
7 bill dictated by recent tragic events around
8 this state. It is a bill whose time has come.
9 And I'm going to vote for it with a great deal
10 of determination and pride, and it is my firm
11 conviction that so will the vast majority of
12 my colleagues.
13 Thank you, Mr. President.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Thank
15 you, Senator Meier.
16 Senator Marcellino.
17 SENATOR MARCELLINO: Thank you,
18 Mr. President.
19 I respect my colleague Senator Diaz
20 for his comments. He must have done a good
21 job in raising his daughter, because she took
22 on a profession that is inherently dangerous,
23 and I respect that. She's got good values.
24 She demonstrates it by putting her life on the
25 line on a daily basis to protect people in her
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1 community.
2 That is what police officers do.
3 They put their lives on the line. They stand
4 between us and the bad people. They stand
5 between civil society and chaos. That's what
6 they do. For that, they deserve our
7 protection.
8 It is not a matter of whether we
9 are considering their life worth more than
10 others. That's not the question. That truly
11 isn't the question. The question is, do we
12 want a civil society or not? Do we want
13 people to go out there and step in between us
14 and violence?
15 That cab driver that was talked
16 about, we don't expect that cab driver to get
17 out of his cab and stop crime. That's not his
18 job. That's not his job. That grandmother
19 that you talked about, we don't expect her to
20 step out of her life and go out of her house
21 and into the street and stop violent crime.
22 But we do expect it of our police officers,
23 the men and women who wear the uniform.
24 By the way, they wear a uniform.
25 It's a target. They stand out. We do it
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1 deliberately. We want them to be seen. We
2 want them to be noticed. We want the bad
3 people to say, Aha, there are police out
4 there, I better not do this.
5 For that risk, for that risk,
6 putting their lives on the line to protect
7 society -- who is society? It's our wives,
8 our husbands, our children, our relatives, our
9 friends, our neighbors. They're protecting
10 you and me. For that risk, they deserve a
11 little extra help. They deserve to be told
12 that, yes, the State of New York is behind
13 you.
14 And if someone decides to thumb
15 their nose, as Senator Meier has so correctly
16 pointed out, at authority, at our laws, and
17 say, We're going to take down the law
18 protectors, we're going to take down the
19 law-keepers, the peacekeepers, to show you
20 that we're in charge, that we rule -- when you
21 can do that, then you really have no society
22 at all.
23 The neighborhood you live in would
24 not be safe without those police officers out
25 there. Without them willing to put it on the
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1 line, we have no protections. We have no
2 safety.
3 So to give them a little extra
4 help, to say to them, yes, society considers
5 your life worth something -- yes, we want you
6 to do that, we respect you for doing that, and
7 if you're doing that, if someone goes after
8 you and someone takes you down, we're going to
9 take them down severely -- that's the least we
10 can do for these people.
11 Mr. President, I urge all of our
12 colleagues: Support this bill. It is
13 reasonable. It is reasonable. We have
14 another bill out there, and we'll debate that
15 bill next, probably. This bill right now is a
16 reasonable bill. Thanks, Senator Golden, for
17 bringing it up. It's time, it's time to pass
18 this measure and put it on the books.
19 I intend to vote aye, and I urge
20 everyone else to do so.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
22 Winner.
23 SENATOR WINNER: Thank you,
24 Mr. President and my colleagues.
25 On March 1 of this year in 2006,
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1 Trooper Andy Sperr was out doing his job in
2 the town of Big Flats in Chemung County when
3 he encountered a car that was parked in a
4 strange location.
5 Unbeknownst to Trooper Sperr, the
6 individuals in that car had just been involved
7 in a bank robbery only minutes before and were
8 in the process of switching cars when Trooper
9 Sperr, in an effort to deter what he thought
10 might be a suspicious vehicle, approached that
11 vehicle -- doing his job, protecting us on a
12 daily basis -- when one individual named Andy
13 Horton opened fire with a .357 magnum and shot
14 him repeatedly as he approached that vehicle
15 and left him for dead while he bled to death
16 at the side of the road.
17 Now, I don't know who among us
18 thinks that that individual ought to be
19 treated with any type of compassion or
20 sympathy. But this legislator doesn't think
21 so and thinks that while we can debate issues
22 of deterrence, we can debate issues of whether
23 or not a death penalty statute is going to
24 prevent a future occurrence such as Andy
25 Horton or someone of his ilk firing on a
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1 police officer, one thing we can know for sure
2 is that the death penalty is an appropriate
3 punishment for the type of act that was
4 committed by Mr. Horton on that afternoon in
5 March of this year.
6 Now, just last weekend Trooper Sean
7 Brown in the town of Veteran in Chemung County
8 approached a vehicle that had stopped at
9 1 o'clock in the morning, approached that
10 vehicle, and he was fired upon by an
11 individual in that vehicle and struck and
12 wounded and was taken to the hospital. And
13 fortunately, he is recovering and has been
14 released today from the St. Joseph's Hospital
15 in Elmira.
16 What is going on here? We cannot
17 tolerate this society attacking police
18 officers and troopers in this state or in this
19 nation. We cannot withstand the type of
20 penetration of that thin blue line that stands
21 between us and anarchy and allow these types
22 of attacks on authority to occur.
23 We have got to have, as a
24 fundamental right, the ability to be safe and
25 secure in our homes. And those that would
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1 attack police officers have the type of
2 depravity that is necessary for us to impose
3 the most significant punishment that is
4 available, and that is capital punishment.
5 And I would urge all of you to support that,
6 recognizing that without that type of
7 protection, we are not safe.
8 Now, the New York State Assembly,
9 where I served when we passed the death
10 penalty, they with great fanfare, and
11 practically about 94 members, voted in favor
12 of imposing capital punishment. I voted in
13 favor of it back then, as did many, many
14 members of both sides of the aisle, and
15 including with the support of the Speaker of
16 Assembly.
17 Now, all of a sudden, we have a
18 glitch in the technical side of the imposition
19 of capital punishment in this state that can
20 be easily fixed without going into the merits
21 as to whether we have capital punishment or
22 not. We have capital punishment on the books
23 in this state, and the Speaker of Assembly and
24 the members of that side of the aisle over in
25 the New York State Assembly who are hiding
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1 between the skirts of Judge Kaye refuse to
2 allow the will of the people to be in place
3 with regard to death penalty going forward.
4 They don't have the political guts
5 to repeal the death penalty; they just want to
6 hide behind the Court of Appeals'
7 technicalities and refuse to have the will of
8 the people in place as far as having capital
9 punishment on the books.
10 We have capital punishment. Let
11 the people's will, as was expressed by the
12 vast majority of the New York State Assembly
13 in 1995, get in place and have that particular
14 statute go forward.
15 We need this bill on the books. We
16 need to protect the Andy Sperrs of this world.
17 We need to make sure our correction officers
18 are safe when they're guarding individuals who
19 are sentenced for multiple murders with life
20 without parole who have nothing to lose in our
21 correctional facilities. We need that
22 protection for those people who put their
23 lives on the line for us every single day.
24 Let's pass this measure, let's pass
25 the Volker bill and stop this nonsense of
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1 hiding between the Court of Appeals on a
2 technicality and denying the will of the
3 people of the State of New York to have
4 capital punishment on the books.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Thank
6 you, Senator Winner.
7 Senator Diaz, for a second time.
8 SENATOR DIAZ: Thank you,
9 Mr. President.
10 I just want to ask a simple
11 question and ask my colleagues to stop the
12 political spinning. Do not try to insult our
13 intelligence. No one here, no one here
14 supports or is in favor of killing police
15 officers. No one. So you are making believe
16 that, oh, the Democrats and that side, they
17 want police officers to be killed. Please.
18 You have a police officer's family
19 there. Respect them, respect their
20 intelligence. Don't play with our
21 intelligence. People know better.
22 The simple question is, you see
23 those children over there? You see those
24 children? How will you tell the mother of one
25 of those children that has been raped and
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1 killed, why -- how will you tell them how come
2 they were not included in that bill? How come
3 you only include in the death penalty people
4 that kill police officers? What about those
5 that kill children? Why didn't you include
6 them? Why didn't you include the one that
7 kills bodegueros and taxi drivers? Why didn't
8 you include those that kill women?
9 That's a simple question. But
10 you -- no, over there, you now try to make
11 political statements, and it's political
12 spinning: Oh, oh, let's stop crime. Let's
13 stop crime? Who is asking you not to stop
14 crime? Stop the political spinning. Stop
15 playing with people's intelligence. People
16 know more than that.
17 The simple question is, if you want
18 the death penalty, if you want the death
19 penalty, why do you only want it for those
20 that kill police officers? Why don't you
21 include the rest of the people that kill other
22 people? That's the simple question.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
24 Golden, why do you rise?
25 SENATOR GOLDEN: Will Senator
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1 Diaz yield for a question?
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
3 Diaz, will you yield for a question?
4 SENATOR DIAZ: Of course I yield
5 for a question.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Yes, he
7 will.
8 SENATOR DIAZ: I'm in that mood
9 today.
10 SENATOR GOLDEN: You seem to
11 think that we're insulting your intelligence.
12 You seem to think that we're grandstanding.
13 And you seem to think that we don't love
14 children and senior citizens because they're
15 not in our bill.
16 And I've expressed to you that
17 there is a bill, Dale Volker's bill, that does
18 do that. But we know that you won't vote for
19 that. So we put on a bill here for police
20 officers that are being gunned down across the
21 city and state of New York. And we ask you to
22 turn around and vote not only for my bill but
23 for Dale Volker's bill.
24 So that that is really
25 grandstanding. And the guy that's really
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1 insulting people's intelligence in this room,
2 sir, is you. And unfortunately --
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
4 Golden --
5 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: What is
6 the question, Mr. President?
7 SENATOR GOLDEN: The question
8 is -- I'm going to the question, Senator.
9 SENATOR DIAZ: This is getting
10 good.
11 SENATOR GOLDEN: And the question
12 is, sir, will you support the death penalty
13 for children and for seniors?
14 SENATOR DIAZ: Mr. President.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
16 Diaz.
17 SENATOR DIAZ: Do I have the
18 floor?
19 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: You
20 yielded for the question.
21 SENATOR DIAZ: Again -- again,
22 I'm saying here -- again, I'm saying here that
23 I respect life. I'm opposed to abortion. I
24 respect life in all shapes and forms. I don't
25 believe in death for anyone. I don't believe
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1 in death penalty for children, for unborn
2 babies. I don't believe in death, period.
3 I'm saying, I'm saying here if you
4 are so eager to bring the death penalty, why
5 don't you include those that kill, with
6 premeditation, their spouses? Why don't you
7 include those that kill, in your bill -- I'm
8 talking about, Mr. President --
9 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
10 Diaz, at this point you can answer the
11 question or refuse to yield.
12 SENATOR DIAZ: No, I have the
13 floor, Mr. President. I want to speak on the
14 bill, and I have the floor.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: But you
16 yielded to Senator Golden. So you can either
17 answer the question --
18 SENATOR DIAZ: No, no, I have the
19 floor.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: So
21 you're going to refuse to yield on the
22 question.
23 SENATOR DIAZ: I want to continue
24 with my statement, Mr. President.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Okay.
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1 Continue on the bill.
2 SENATOR DIAZ: Yes. I'm saying
3 if you are so deeply concerned to bring the
4 death penalty, go ahead. Nobody's stopping
5 you from doing it. But stop the spinning.
6 And we're talking about this bill,
7 this specific bill, brought out to the floor
8 by a person that is the chairman of the Aging
9 Committee. If I were the chairman of the
10 Aging Committee, I would protect the aging in
11 any shape or form. If I were the chairman of
12 the Aging Committee, I would protect my aging
13 no matter what.
14 So I'm talking about this bill,
15 because I am a member of the Aging Committee
16 too and I was the chairman of the aging
17 committee in the City Council. And I'm tired
18 of people ignoring senior citizens and not
19 including them in bills. Oh, in another bill
20 we'll deal with that. No, no, no. Another
21 bill tomorrow. (Singing.) Tomorrow,
22 tomorrow. It's not tomorrow, it's today.
23 And stop, stop trying to say that
24 we don't care about police officers' lives.
25 My daughter is a police officer, my only
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1 daughter. So don't insult our intelligence
2 and don't spin no more. The question is why,
3 why, why children and women and senior
4 citizens were not included in this bill.
5 That's my question.
6 So stop saying: Oh, what will you
7 tell the family of the police officer there,
8 what will you tell the people out there? Oh,
9 that we want police officers to be killed.
10 The Democrat party, this side of
11 the aisle, don't want police officers to be
12 killed. We protect police officers and we
13 protect everybody. We want crime to stop,
14 period.
15 Thank you.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
17 Parker. Why aren't you in your seat?
18 SENATOR PARKER: Mr. President,
19 on the bill.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: On the
21 bill.
22 SENATOR PARKER: This has been, I
23 think, an important debate and a great debate
24 that really kind of reflects kind of where we
25 are as a state and really how important we
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1 think this issue is.
2 And I want to thank Senator Golden,
3 because I know that he has a particular
4 interest in this, being a former officer
5 himself. I know he has the best intentions.
6 We come from the same county. I know that he
7 deals with same kind of issues that I deal
8 with as it relates to crime in our communities
9 and making sure that the people are safe.
10 I really wanted to relate myself to
11 some of the comments made by Senator Meier.
12 And I thought they were important because we
13 have, this year, been talking about education
14 funding and healthcare and we're talking about
15 housing and transportation. And he's
16 absolutely right that none of those things
17 mean anything if we don't have a civil society
18 where people feel they're protected. And I
19 think that we ought to be looking at how we in
20 fact better protect our communities.
21 And while I think that this bill is
22 well-meaning, I'm not sure that it again goes
23 to the place that we ought to be going to.
24 Unfortunately, unfortunately what
25 we know is that bills that dole out extreme
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1 punishments like the death penalty are
2 ineffective at preventing crime. They're
3 ineffective at preventing crime. So we're
4 looking at how do we in fact decrease the
5 number of deaths that are happening in our
6 community. And I'm less concerned with this
7 bill and more concerned with both this bill
8 and the Volker bill as relates to the death
9 penalty, period.
10 That death penalty bills do not
11 prevent crimes. They don't prevent crimes
12 against police officers or other kind of law
13 enforcement. They don't prevent crimes
14 against, you know, victims of domestic
15 violence. They don't prevent crimes against,
16 you know, women or seniors or anyone else.
17 They don't prevent crimes.
18 When we look at the statistics
19 across the country, when we look at other
20 states that have very active death penalties,
21 their crime rates have not dropped in
22 relationship to having the death penalty.
23 When you look at reports done by places like
24 the Institute for Justice right here in
25 New York City, the experts there will tell you
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1 that the death penalty does not prevent crime.
2 So the question then is what does
3 prevent crime. And when we look at it, the
4 things that prevent crime, and particularly
5 violent crime, is doing things like increasing
6 the economy, providing full-time jobs at a
7 living wage with benefits. It is making sure
8 that people have proper housing.
9 It's kind of interesting that,
10 again, Senator Meier is right that you can't
11 have these things unless you have safety. But
12 it's interesting also to note that having
13 proper healthcare, funding schools fully,
14 having proper housing actually helps you
15 prevent crime. Because when people have
16 well --
17 SENATOR MEIER: Mr. President.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
19 Meier, why do you rise?
20 SENATOR MEIER: Will the Senator
21 yield.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
23 Parker.
24 SENATOR PARKER: When I finish,
25 I'll be happy to yield. When I finish
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1 speaking on the bill, I'll be happy to yield.
2 SENATOR MEIER: I thought so.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Okay.
4 Senator?
5 SENATOR PARKER: That having --
6 when we properly fund education and our young
7 people are going to schools that are not just
8 teaching to the tests, that have full-time --
9 when they have music and art and dance and
10 athletics as regular parts of the curriculum,
11 when we're doing things to have after-school
12 programs to engage our young people, when
13 we're making sure that people have
14 decent-quality, affordable housing, when
15 healthcare, both physical healthcare and
16 mental healthcare -- and hopefully we're on --
17 not to jump on Tom Duane's bandwagon, but when
18 we start dealing with things like Timothy's
19 Law and we make sure that we're providing the
20 kind of healthcare we need both for people
21 physically and mentally, that then we will
22 have an opportunity to have real safety in our
23 communities because we'll be dealing with the
24 issues that push people to engage in crime, to
25 engage in violence.
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1 But there's also some things that
2 we can do from a criminal justice perspective
3 right now. There are bills out there that
4 would in fact close the loophole around gun
5 ownership. You know, right now we are not as
6 good as we ought to be on who can own a gun.
7 We have not done what we need to in terms of
8 ballistic ID'ing and making sure that we
9 extend the law to make sure we're getting
10 ballistic IDs on things like long rifles,
11 assault weapons, and shotguns, which have
12 become the weapon of choice for terrorists and
13 for many of our criminals.
14 We need to be making sure that gun
15 dealers in the state are not, you know,
16 slipping through the cracks in terms of how
17 they're dealing with guns. And we need to
18 deal with some of those criminal justice
19 things. Those have a much better effect on
20 reducing crime, making sure that we don't have
21 the kind of society where violence pervades
22 every aspect of our lives.
23 And we really can then be proud of
24 our society, because then we're preventing
25 crime and not just, you know, feeding our need
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1 to have revenge when our communities are
2 wronged.
3 And I understand how strong it is.
4 In fact, no one understands more than I do.
5 But it's really important that we really don't
6 feed that need just to have revenge and we
7 really say if we're going to protect our
8 communities and we're going to make sure that
9 we are preventing crimes, that we do the
10 things that actually keep us from the point of
11 getting to a place where crime is prevalent in
12 our communities.
13 And I will yield for a question if
14 the Senator still has one.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
16 Meier.
17 SENATOR MEIER: Senator Parker,
18 you don't mean to suggest, do you -- because I
19 want to make sure that I'm clear on what I
20 thought I heard -- that people become
21 murderers because they didn't have the
22 appropriate programs in their schools?
23 SENATOR PARKER: I am suggesting
24 that when in fact that you provide the kind of
25 education that we ought to provide -- like
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1 when we look at what they call third-party
2 externalities -- that is, what does education
3 provide? It doesn't just provide people
4 education, but it helps them get access to
5 jobs, jobs help people -- you know, who have
6 full-time jobs at a living wage with benefits,
7 give them the ability to make a living so thus
8 people are not going into things like, for
9 instance, drug dealing. Where they're not
10 doing drug dealing because they just want to
11 be a drug dealer; most people are drug dealing
12 because they find it a lucrative way to make
13 money.
14 If we're giving people other
15 avenues to go, so education helps to create
16 those other avenues, those other
17 opportunities. Having quality housing creates
18 those other avenues, those other
19 opportunities. Having good healthcare, you
20 know, again, allows people to have those kind
21 of opportunities in lives where crime doesn't
22 become an alternative.
23 Because typically the crimes that
24 we're talking about, particularly -- and I
25 know in Kings County are not so much, you
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1 know, some of the evil people that you're
2 talking -- I know some of those folks are out
3 there. But the reality is that if we're going
4 to prevent the kind of crimes that we're
5 dealing with on a day-to-day, it is, you know,
6 people with handguns who kill a police officer
7 in the commission of another felony. Or are
8 trying to escape being captured from the
9 commission of another felony.
10 And so those are the kinds of
11 things that we can prevent if we keep people
12 from perpetrating or feeling like they're
13 trapped into perpetrating those primary
14 felonies that they're engaged in.
15 SENATOR MEIER: Will the Senator
16 continue to yield.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Will
18 you continue to yield, Senator Parker?
19 SENATOR PARKER: Yes,
20 Mr. President.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Go
22 ahead, Senator Meier.
23 SENATOR MEIER: Senator, I don't
24 know what third-party externality is.
25 I do know what evil is. I've seen
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1 it. Do you agree with me, Senator, that some
2 people commit murder for no other reason other
3 than they are evil, that is what is within
4 their heart, they are evil?
5 SENATOR PARKER: I wouldn't
6 necessarily agree with you. And let me give
7 you a quick public policy lesson. That when
8 you look at public policy, there are
9 consequences from public policy. You have
10 primary consequences from public policy, you
11 have secondary consequences, third -- and then
12 third, tertiary ones. Right?
13 So the first one, when we do
14 education, the first thing that happens is
15 kids, they get educated. The second thing
16 that happens to them from a secondary
17 perspective is that they actually get jobs and
18 they become more productive. Which is why we
19 have internship programs, because we're trying
20 to create a link between people's education
21 and the workforce. The third thing that
22 happens to them, as a result of having
23 full-time jobs at a living wage with benefits,
24 they actually become better citizens. And
25 that would be a tertiary consequence of the
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1 public policy of fully funding, I don't know,
2 something random like CFE, where it would be
3 helpful in terms of that.
4 And so the more people who are
5 educated and get full-time jobs at a living
6 wage with benefits who then become good
7 citizens, the less criminals we have in our
8 society. The less criminals we have in our
9 society, the less crime, and the less need for
10 us to feed this need for revenge, which is
11 simply, I believe, what the death penalty is.
12 SENATOR MEIER: Mr. President,
13 I'm not entirely satisfied, and I am
14 astounded, but I guess I'll just sit down.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Thank
16 you.
17 Senator Schneiderman.
18 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Thank you,
19 Mr. President.
20 If I may bring us back from more
21 metaphysical pursuits of the nature of evil or
22 the existence of evil, if the sponsor would
23 yield for a few questions, I would appreciate
24 it.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH:
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1 Senator, do you yield?
2 SENATOR GOLDEN: I do.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH:
4 Continue.
5 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Through
6 you, Mr. President, does this legislation
7 change the law of the State of New York
8 regarding convictions obtained through the
9 testimony of in-custody informants?
10 SENATOR GOLDEN: I don't believe
11 so, no.
12 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Oh, and
13 I've got the Greek chorus behind me, but I
14 believe the answers would be the same for
15 Senator Volker's bill as well, so I welcome
16 him giving you the high sign if you misspeak.
17 But this bill and Senator Volker's
18 bill, do either one of these change the rules
19 of the State of New York regarding the need
20 for corroboration of single-eyewitness
21 testimony resulting in a conviction?
22 SENATOR GOLDEN: No.
23 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Through
24 you, Mr. President, does this bill or the next
25 bill we'll be addressing change the laws of
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1 the State of New York regarding the need to
2 videotape interrogations of suspects?
3 SENATOR GOLDEN: No.
4 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: And
5 finally, does this bill or Senator Volker's
6 bill change the law of the State of New York
7 with regard to requiring blind lineup
8 procedures or otherwise changing the laws
9 covering lineup procedures in the State of
10 New York?
11 SENATOR GOLDEN: No, Senator, it
12 does not.
13 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: I thank
14 the sponsor for his answers.
15 Mr. President, on the bill.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: On the
17 bill.
18 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: I think
19 we're dealing with two issues here, one that
20 Senator Parker just was attempting to address
21 and the other which I'm going to raise now.
22 The first issue, which Senator
23 Parker and Senator Diaz also in part was
24 addressing, is the question of, you know, what
25 does the death penalty really do to protect
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1 police officers. Does it really stop people
2 who, if you want to go with the metaphysical
3 arguments that Senator Meier has raised, are
4 truly evil? Are those people deterred? Does
5 the death penalty actually bring anyone back?
6 And I think the answer to that is no. And we
7 will speak more about that later.
8 But the second issue that I want to
9 raise now is the question of whether the death
10 penalty as it would be applied in the State of
11 New York under the current laws of the State
12 of New York will be fairly and effectively
13 applied to ensure that no innocent person is
14 subject to this ultimate sanction.
15 And I think there are people
16 here -- there are some people here who for
17 spiritual reasons, and this -- you know, I
18 don't mean to -- if I sounded at all
19 disrespectful of Senator Meier's raising the
20 question of evil, I really don't mean to be,
21 because this is really in some respects a
22 spiritual issue. A lot of people -- some
23 people, as Senator Diaz does, have a spiritual
24 and a moral objection to the death penalty, as
25 he does to abortion, and I respect the
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1 consistency with that. Senator Marchi is
2 another proponent of that, against the death
3 penalty, against abortion. They can truly
4 call themselves pro-life.
5 People who are for the death
6 penalty and against abortion, I think that out
7 of respect for church doctrine you should not
8 call yourself pro-life. But this is a
9 spiritual issue for some people.
10 For other people, and I put myself
11 more in that category, we're concerned because
12 the death penalty as applied in the United
13 States -- and as I believe it would be applied
14 in the New York under the current state of the
15 laws of the State of New York -- would not
16 guarantee that innocent people are not
17 executed.
18 And in fact, the death penalty as
19 applied in the United States has demonstrated
20 that there are three factors that determine
21 whether or not you get the death penalty: the
22 race of the suspect and of the victim, the
23 intelligence of the suspect, and the wealth of
24 the suspect. Those are the three things that
25 in study after study, in state after state,
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1 determine who gets on death row and who does
2 not.
3 Now, in New York we have people who
4 are wrongfully convicted. And I would like to
5 open the door to a question that I think will
6 come up as we enter the debate on Senator
7 Volker's bill -- we haven't held the hearings
8 that we were promised we were going to have
9 the last time we debated the death penalty.
10 Since 1995, when this Legislature
11 enacted the death penalty bill, there's a lot
12 of new evidence about innocent people being
13 convicted, about the effectiveness of the
14 death penalty, about the cost of the death
15 penalty. I believe the last time we debated
16 this we were assured we were going to have
17 hearings on it. I hope we will. The fact of
18 the matter is that innocent people are
19 convicted in New York State.
20 Newsday reported, in December 2002,
21 11 cases of 13 people being wrongfully
22 convicted of murder in the previous five
23 years.
24 Interestingly enough, the same
25 year, the Republican governor of Illinois
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1 determined through a study that there were 13
2 people wrongfully convicted on death row in
3 Illinois. Now, in response to that, he did
4 what I think is the only responsible thing to
5 do and reasonable thing to do, he appointed a
6 commission to study the possibility of error
7 in capital prosecutions.
8 And the commission, among other
9 things, examined a whole series of reports,
10 including a report which I commend to the
11 sponsors of these bills by a group of
12 academics headed by James Liebman of Columbia
13 University that found, among other things, in
14 a group of states that they studied over a
15 period of years, there was a 68 percent
16 appellate reversal in capital prosecutions.
17 So the evidence started to emerge
18 early in this decade that there were serious
19 problems elsewhere. Part of that was due to
20 improvements in DNA technology, the expansions
21 of the DNA database, and things like that.
22 So the Republican governor of
23 Illinois responded by commuting the sentences
24 of everyone on death row in Illinois.
25 At the same time, also in 2003, the
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1 governor of Massachusetts, who was looking to
2 reintroduce the death penalty, created a
3 council on capital punishment. That council
4 met, held hearings, did studies and determined
5 that there were 10 safeguards that it deemed
6 necessary to ensuring that they would not
7 execute innocent people. Nine of those 10
8 safeguards are not present in the law of
9 New York. And the issues that I just asked
10 the sponsor about are among those safeguards.
11 We can convict people in the State
12 of New York with the testimony of an
13 in-custody defendant. That's someone who's in
14 jail looking for way to make a deal. People
15 should not be subject to the ultimate sanction
16 without corroboration of that. We do have
17 rules regarding accomplice testimony in the
18 State of New York. I would urge that those
19 need to be expanded before we move forward
20 towards enacting a death penalty.
21 Eyewitness testimony, testimony of
22 a single eyewitness -- any of you who have
23 tried a case with eyewitness testimony know
24 how difficult those can be. There are people
25 who have ended up own death row in other
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1 states due to eyewitness identification by
2 single witnesses. Let's require
3 corroboration.
4 Videotaping of interrogations to
5 make sure that we know what's going on there,
6 that there aren't people being manipulated or
7 abused in any way or simply -- and again, this
8 comes to the intelligence issue of suspects --
9 overwhelmed by the circumstances.
10 Lineup procedures. Again, this is
11 all -- this all comes out of the Massachusetts
12 study. A blind lineup procedure should be
13 required in the State of New York. The person
14 who's conducting it, the administrator, should
15 not know who the perpetrator is, lest,
16 intentionally or unintentionally, they lead
17 the witness towards identifying that person.
18 These are the kinds of things we
19 should be talking about in the State of
20 New York, these are the kinds of things we
21 should be looking at in the State of New York
22 before we enact the ultimate sanction.
23 The effort that is being made with
24 this piece of legislation -- and I don't doubt
25 the sincerity of my colleagues, who are
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1 frustrated. They believe in the death
2 penalty, they are frustrated by the inability
3 of it to move forward in the Assembly. But
4 the truth of the matter is, let's look at the
5 overall issue. Someone who is wrongfully
6 convicted and executed who shot a police
7 officer, that's just as disgraceful if we as a
8 society do that than if we execute someone who
9 is wrongfully convicted of killing someone
10 else.
11 The issue here is ensuring that the
12 innocent are protected. This is not something
13 we made up. This is something that was
14 nothing short of an obsession of the founders
15 of the Republic, and you can see it in the
16 writings around the drafting of the
17 Constitution. Because of the abuses by the
18 British crown, the concern for trial by jury
19 and protections in our criminal justice system
20 was something that was truly at the root of
21 the founding of this country.
22 So I think that we have to address
23 the issues that will come up now, and I'm glad
24 Senator Volker is here so I don't have to
25 repeat myself, in the context of the death
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1 penalty bill that he is going to propound that
2 deals with the death penalty for every
3 crime -- or not every crime, but for the
4 killing of people other than police officers
5 as well as police officers.
6 The question is, have we done
7 everything we can do to get the most
8 up-to-date information about the efficacy of
9 the death penalty, ways to ensure that the
10 innocent are not subject to this ultimate
11 sanction? And the answer clearly is no. We
12 haven't held hearings, we haven't done
13 anything. We're just moving the same bill
14 that we moved in previous years.
15 And finally, I would like to follow
16 up on Senator Parker's point that we have to
17 do everything we can do to protect our police
18 officers. But there is no peer-reviewed
19 scientific study that has ever demonstrated
20 that the death penalty stops the evil people,
21 if Senator Meier's contention is valid, or
22 just people who are caught up in things and
23 end up pulling that trigger -- there is no
24 peer-reviewed scientific study that
25 demonstrates that those people are deterred.
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1 Indeed, from my own experience
2 spending a couple of years working at a
3 prison, I think the most out-of-control
4 criminals are the hardest to deter.
5 If you want to have the death
6 penalty for securities fraud, you'll have the
7 cleanest markets in the history of the world,
8 but I don't think anyone is proposing that.
9 That's a group of people, white-collar
10 criminals, that can be -- uh-oh, now I'm
11 giving Dale ideas. The white-collar criminals
12 can be deterred.
13 I don't think people who are so out
14 of whack that they would kill a police officer
15 are deterred. That's my personal opinion.
16 But let me read now a statement
17 from police officers who wrote this in
18 response to the death penalty bill, when this
19 was first advanced, relating to police
20 officers. And I just want to put this into
21 the record.
22 It states: "We are current and
23 former police officers. Every time one of our
24 fellow officers is injured or killed, we feel
25 the pain as though we were shot ourselves.
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1 New Yorkers owe our police genuine protection
2 from such threats. We need the best
3 protective equipment. We need programs and
4 laws that take guns off our streets. We need
5 funding for innovative crime-prevention
6 programs and more police. And if something
7 happens to us in the line of duty, our
8 families need the very best in support,
9 including grief counseling, financial
10 assistance, and scholarship programs for our
11 children.
12 "Yet" -- and it refers to this new
13 death penalty bill that we're debating right
14 now -- "[it] diverts attention from those very
15 real needs and provides grieving families with
16 nothing of substance. We urge our lawmakers
17 not to use the blood of our brothers to jam
18 through irresponsible and ill-conceived
19 policies that have nothing to do with the law
20 enforcement community's needs. The death
21 penalty is a broken and wasteful system that
22 risks executing the innocent, unfairly targets
23 people of color, and drains precious resources
24 from meaningful programs that support law
25 enforcement and victims' families."
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1 And it's signed by a whole series
2 of police organizations.
3 Let's not pretend that the death
4 penalty does things it doesn't do. Let's take
5 the actions that really protect police
6 officers. Let's not pretend that we've done
7 everything we can do to gather the evidence.
8 The Assembly has held public
9 hearings. And what was the result in the
10 Assembly? There's actually less support as a
11 result of those hearings in the Assembly for
12 the death penalty than there was before it.
13 The Assembly Codes Committee voted today 13-5,
14 including Republican votes, against reporting
15 out the death penalty bill.
16 So I would respectfully submit that
17 because of our lack of inquiry, our lack of
18 the willingness to hold hearings and examine
19 the reports, examine what happened in
20 Massachusetts and Illinois, we are rendering
21 ourselves less and less capable of addressing
22 this issue while the Assembly has been
23 gathering information.
24 And you may agree or disagree with
25 their positions, but you can't argue with the
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1 point that they have held hearings on the
2 issue. We've been promised hearings on the
3 issue, but it has yet to be delivered on.
4 I'm going to vote no on this bill.
5 I think that Senator Diaz's point is very
6 important. There's no one I don't think in
7 this chamber on either side of the aisle
8 who -- I'll be glad to yield as soon as I'm
9 done, which will be very shortly.
10 There's no one in this chamber on
11 either side of the aisle who does not want to
12 do what we can do to protect police officers.
13 These are our heroes. I actually agree with
14 some of the points made by my colleagues that
15 an attack on police officer is not just like
16 another crime, because it is an attack on
17 society.
18 Which, incidentally, is the same
19 argument that is made in support of
20 hate-crimes bills, because it's an attack on a
21 particular ethnic or religious group or based
22 on sexual orientation.
23 But I do believe that. But we all
24 support those efforts. Let's work on issues
25 that are truly important to police officers,
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1 like getting guns off the street.
2 I'm going to vote no on this.
3 We're now going to move on to the debate, I
4 guess, for the other bill, but a lot of the
5 points I've made I hope will resonate with you
6 when that debate comes up as well.
7 Thank you, Mr. President. I'll be
8 glad to yield.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
10 Golden, why do you rise?
11 SENATOR GOLDEN: If the Senator
12 would yield for a question.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: He
14 will.
15 SENATOR GOLDEN: Senator
16 Schneiderman, in your description and your
17 questioning of me of the four different
18 approaches that you would like to see changed
19 in the legislation that would allow for what
20 you believe to be a better bill, if those four
21 changes were made to your satisfaction, would
22 you vote in favor of the death penalty?
23 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Through
24 you, Mr. President, fair question.
25 There actually were -- and I would
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1 refer the sponsor to the January 2005 report
2 of the Committee on Capital Punishment of the
3 Association of the Bar of the City of
4 New York, which enumerated that -- I gave
5 several examples. In fact, there are more
6 recommendations there.
7 If a death penalty bill was crafted
8 with all of those recommendations, that would
9 be a much harder decision for me. I have
10 little hope that these changes will be made --
11 maybe when we get a new governor. I don't
12 know. In all honesty, I don't know.
13 I would have to say that I -- I --
14 again, this really comes to a philosophical
15 and moral issue. I'm not someone who doesn't
16 believe that, you know, the state never has
17 the right to take life. We have the right to
18 send our children to die in wars. So I would
19 be conflicted.
20 My concern is this. No one has
21 ever gotten it right so far. There has never
22 been, in the history of the United States, a
23 state that has not had a death penalty that
24 discriminates against poor people, against
25 people of color, against people of lower
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1 intelligence and mental disability. And I
2 would have to be very, very confident that
3 we'd addressed all those problems before I
4 vote yes.
5 But that's a fair question, and I
6 don't know the answer, Mr. President. Thank
7 you.
8 SENATOR GOLDEN: I have one
9 further question, if the Senator would yield.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
11 Schneiderman, will you yield for another
12 question?
13 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Yes.
14 SENATOR GOLDEN: We constantly do
15 hearings, and I believe in having hearings on
16 bills that are appropriate.
17 Now, I'm going to point out
18 Nixzmary Brown. We've had hearings, the
19 Assembly has had hearings, and yet we don't
20 have a bill on Nixzmary Brown from the
21 Assembly.
22 So if we're going to have hearings,
23 are the hearings for TV or are the hearings to
24 establish real legislation? It doesn't seem
25 to happen. And that is my question of
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1 concern.
2 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: I think
3 that, again, the Senator raises a legitimate
4 concern.
5 I think that our intent certainly
6 in this area -- and I think whatever you can
7 say, you agree or disagree with this. There
8 are studies, there are people who have
9 information of tremendous substance.
10 I think it should be the concern of
11 everyone in this house, for example, that as
12 reported this week in the Amsterdam News, the
13 May 2006 issue of Psychological Science, the
14 journal of the Association for Psychological
15 Science, reported that -- and I'm quoting now
16 from the author of the study, a Stanford
17 psychologist -- if you look more black, it
18 more than doubles your changes of receiving
19 the death penalty when the victim is white.
20 Now, this is even saying that more
21 light-skinned African-Americans are less
22 likely to receive the death penalty.
23 These are matters of substance. We
24 should look at all of these things. We should
25 look at all of these things.
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1 So in this case, sure, are there
2 sometimes hearings held that people do more
3 for television than anything else? Yeah. But
4 that's not our intention here. And I think
5 that our intention is to try and advance the
6 process.
7 We certainly do want to follow up,
8 and I understood that there were statements
9 made, certainly last time we debated the death
10 penalty, that we would hold hearings. I would
11 welcome the opportunity for us to do so.
12 And I don't -- I think some of
13 these issues are going to come up in the
14 context of Senator Skelos' bill, so I don't
15 want to unduly impede things. But I
16 appreciate the sponsor's sincerity in his
17 effort to advance this particular piece of
18 legislation. I hope you're not getting false
19 hope up about whether or not this will move in
20 the other house, because I think, if anything,
21 let's not give anyone false hope that this is
22 going to move forward in the Assembly.
23 Thank you, Mr. President.
24 SENATOR GOLDEN: I applaud the
25 Senator for his honesty.
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1 I would hope that we would be able
2 to come together, because we have come
3 together on other legislation.
4 And I understand that he addressed
5 the concern, Senator Schneiderman, on taking
6 the guns off of the streets and getting them
7 out of the hands of people who shouldn't have
8 them. And we have a bill coming up, a C
9 felony on possession of an illegal gun. And
10 hopefully I can see Senator Schneiderman on
11 that bill, and many of my other colleagues on
12 both sides of the house, so that we can take
13 the illegal guns out of the hands of
14 perpetrators and put them behind bars where
15 they belong.
16 Thank you, Senator. Thank you,
17 Mr. President.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
19 Nozzolio.
20 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Thank you,
21 Mr. President. On the bill.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: On the
23 bill.
24 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Mr. President
25 and my colleagues, I humbly rise to add
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1 support to this bill and to thank our
2 sponsors, particularly Senator Golden, who has
3 brought great strength and passion to the
4 promotion of this measure.
5 I'd like to bring a different
6 perspective, one focused on law enforcement
7 but looking at it from the perspective of
8 those 30,000 brave men and women who work in
9 our correctional facilities.
10 Before I do that, though, I'd like
11 to add perspective on what this house has done
12 in supporting measures throughout the last
13 decade that have established a zero tolerance
14 for violence in our state. By all accounts,
15 the measures we have enacted which have put
16 the most violent of criminals behind bars for
17 longer periods of time have resulted in
18 remarkable changes in the crime statistics of
19 this state.
20 We've seen rapid declines in the
21 incidence of rape, of robbery, of otherwise
22 strong violence against each other, and a big
23 reason for that is the statutes that we
24 created keep violent individuals behind bars
25 for longer periods of time. Our population of
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1 prison inmates in this state has been reduced
2 over the past number of years, but those who
3 are behind bars are behind bars because they
4 have committed very violent acts. And we as a
5 law-making body have stated that they should
6 remain behind bars for a longer period of
7 time.
8 A thousand years from now, our
9 society will be judged by its commitment to
10 justice, how we as a people have established
11 policies and practices which create justice
12 for all and safety for our citizens. This is
13 one area of the law where we are inadequate in
14 our state. We have yet to establish justice.
15 We have yet to -- particularly for those on
16 the frontlines of the criminal justice system,
17 our law enforcement officers, we have not
18 established the proper laws to create safety.
19 To the comments that immediately
20 preceded me by Senator Schneiderman, I say his
21 concern of putting an innocent behind bars and
22 sentencing that innocent to the death penalty,
23 his commitment, I think as far as rhetoric is
24 concerned, is a step in the right direction.
25 But I would rather see this house
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1 and the Assembly establish a statewide DNA
2 database where each individual who's arrested
3 for a crime, whether that be an arrest for a
4 misdemeanor or a felony, participates in the
5 DNA database.
6 One of the things that you cannot
7 hide behind is the fact that our laws have yet
8 to keep pace with technology. And if we were
9 extracting a fingerprint from an individual
10 for an arrest, why should we not extract DNA
11 so that we would know, in effect, a greater
12 base of information as to who perpetrated a
13 crime.
14 But I want to get back to our
15 prisons and back to those places where we have
16 placed violent members of society behind the
17 prison walls for a longer period of time.
18 What do you say, who are going to
19 vote against this bill, that we are turning
20 our backs on correction officers of this state
21 and the correctional personnel of this state
22 because an individual sentenced to life
23 without parole is an individual who's
24 sentenced to prison without anything to lose.
25 There is absolutely no deterrent whatsoever to
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1 an individual who has already committed
2 murder, who may have already committed the
3 most heinous crime of an attack in a violent
4 murder of a police officer -- what is to deter
5 that individual from being sentenced to prison
6 and not committing murder again?
7 How can you in the Democrat -- the
8 Minority conference of this house say to the
9 brave men and women, our correction officers,
10 our correctional personnel, who already walk
11 the toughest beat in America, that those who
12 are sentenced to life without parole are
13 sentenced with nothing left to lose? They've
14 already committed murder once. You can't
15 sentence someone to two lives without parole,
16 or three or four.
17 You need to guarantee to those
18 correction officers how you can guarantee
19 their safety, and how can you guarantee the
20 safety to the teachers, the custodians,
21 everyone else who works in our jails across
22 New York State.
23 What is your answer to that? That
24 we have established life without parole, we
25 have done our jobs? Frankly, you're
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1 sentencing many of our COs to death by turning
2 your backs on them and supporting only a
3 half-baked punishment, a half-baked justice
4 for the citizens of our state.
5 I don't wish to get preachy, but I
6 do believe that a thousand years from now we
7 are going be judged by our commitment to
8 justice and the safety and security of our
9 citizens. Standing, adorning, behind the
10 president of this Senate's chair is, in
11 beautiful stained glass, the great seal of the
12 great State of New York. And on that seal
13 there are two ladies. One is Lady Liberty, a
14 concept that all of us take with great, great
15 pride. And the Statue of Liberty adorning our
16 waters, the pride that we all have in knowing
17 we are the state of liberty.
18 Lady Justice also adorns our state
19 seal. She also looks over this chamber. How
20 are we establishing justice in this state by
21 denying justice to those who perpetrate the
22 most heinous of crimes, as Senator Meier and
23 Senator Winner have both described as the most
24 evil of evils, those who would kill a police
25 officer in the cause of duty, trying to keep
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1 our peace?
2 We are not establishing justice in
3 New York unless we establish the penalty for
4 those who commit the ultimate crime. And a
5 brush-off on the shoulder and saying life
6 without parole is what you get says to our
7 correction officers that we don't care about
8 justice.
9 Well, I know I care about justice.
10 I know Senator Golden, who sponsors this
11 legislation, cares about justice. And it
12 should be justice for all. That's why I
13 support this bill, Mr. President, and urge my
14 colleagues to do the same.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
16 Alesi.
17 SENATOR ALESI: Thank you.
18 Mr. President, would Senator Diaz
19 yield for one very brief question, please?
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
21 Diaz, will you yield?
22 SENATOR DIAZ: Yes,
23 Mr. President.
24 SENATOR ALESI: Thank you,
25 Mr. President. Senator, thank you.
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1 Senator, I would simply ask you
2 this. Did you support the bias-crime
3 legislation that this house and the Assembly
4 passed and was signed into law by the
5 Governor?
6 SENATOR DIAZ: Bias crime?
7 SENATOR ALESI: Do you support
8 the bias-crime legislation that exists in
9 New York State?
10 SENATOR DIAZ: Yes, I do.
11 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Excuse me,
12 Mr. President. Point of order.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
14 Schneiderman.
15 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Point of
16 order.
17 I don't want to disrupt the debate
18 on these important issues, but Senator Diaz
19 did not have the floor, so he cannot be asked
20 to yield for a question.
21 I suppose, Senator Alesi, if we're
22 just going to -- if you have a question and
23 the Senator wants to yield, I'm not going to
24 try and shut it down. But let's try and
25 follow the rules. This is going to be a --
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1 SENATOR ALESI: Mr. President, I
2 would concur with that. And it's not
3 necessary for me to pursue it any further.
4 Let me make my point, though --
5 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Point
6 of order.
7 I think you can ask someone to
8 yield, I believe, at any time who's been
9 involved in a debate after when it's your time
10 to speak. But since Senator Alesi has so
11 graciously agreed to speak on the bill, we'll
12 continue.
13 SENATOR ALESI: Thank you.
14 And I think the point should be
15 made very clearly, that for anyone in this
16 Legislature, and that included those people
17 who voted for the bias-crime legislation, and
18 the Governor himself, who signed that, would
19 recognize that we do have special treatment
20 for people who are considered to be in a
21 special class. That's the law. And we do
22 have more severe penalties for crimes that are
23 perpetrated against those people who are in a
24 special class.
25 And what Senator Golden's
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1 legislation does here, without respect to the
2 main body of the debate about the death
3 penalty, is simply to say that police
4 officers, according to this legislation,
5 should be -- and I agree completely --
6 considered to be in a special class when it
7 comes to punishment for crimes against police
8 officers.
9 Philosophically, no different than
10 the bias-crime legislation that we have in
11 this state now as law, recognizing that it is
12 something that we do in New York State. We
13 create more severe penalties for the same
14 crimes against a certain class of people.
15 It's the law.
16 And so when we're looking at
17 Senator Golden's legislation, without regard
18 to anything else in the debate about the
19 penalties, the death penalty, we've already
20 established a precedent.
21 And so when Senator Diaz earlier
22 said why are police any more special than
23 anyone else, the answer, to me, is very
24 simple. They are not, on a day-to-day basis,
25 any more special than any of us are any more
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1 special because of what we are or who we are.
2 We're all created equal. That's recognized.
3 But when they're doing something on
4 behalf of society, when they're going out and
5 doing their job and putting on their uniform
6 and they're clearly identified as someone who
7 is part of the bedrock of our social
8 structure, they're protecting us from
9 lawlessness, then they are special.
10 They're not special as human
11 beings, they're special in a special category
12 because of what they do to protect us. And
13 the law is clear on this, the proposed law is
14 clear on this. It says when they're doing
15 their job.
16 And so I would have to say that
17 it's a foregone conclusion that I would be
18 supporting this bill. But in response to
19 Senator Diaz's question about are police more
20 special than others and why are we making a
21 separate bill for them, my answer is simple.
22 Yes, when they're wearing their badge and
23 their uniform, they are a lot more special,
24 because they're protecting each and every one
25 of us.
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1 And the interesting thing about
2 that effort that they do, day in and day out
3 when they're putting their lives on the line,
4 is they're making us more special than they
5 are. They're making us more special than they
6 are themselves. They're making a statement:
7 I'm willing, when I go to work, to die for
8 you. Whatever other job you're doing in this
9 society, I as a police officer, when I'm
10 acting in that capacity, am making you more
11 special than I am. I'm willing to die for
12 you.
13 So when the Senator says are police
14 any more special than anybody else, I would
15 say yes, when they're protecting us. And the
16 police would say no, I am no more special than
17 you; in fact, you are far more special than I
18 am, because I will lay down my life to protect
19 you.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Is
21 there any other Senator wishing to be heard?
22 Senator Connor.
23 SENATOR CONNOR: Thank you,
24 Mr. President.
25 You know, I wasn't even going to
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1 speak on this bill because, as with so many
2 people on this issue, my view of the death
3 penalty relates to the total universe and to
4 Senator Volker's bill. And I don't want to
5 get into the debate as it's been constructed
6 so far.
7 But just let me say the only
8 rationale I can think of for this bill before
9 us now is to try and present, to a public
10 whose attitudes I suspect have been changing
11 over the past decade or two, perhaps the
12 most -- I don't want to use the word
13 "sympathy," but sympathetic case in favor of
14 the death penalty.
15 Because certainly all of us share
16 the enormous abhorrence when a law enforcement
17 officer, someone who is protecting all of us,
18 is cut down in the line of duty. And we are
19 all outraged by that. And yes, it does offend
20 all of us in a very special way. And it does
21 cry out for the maximum public concern.
22 But in reality, Mr. President --
23 and I will address it in the next debate in
24 some detail -- I don't think there's a member
25 here whose position as to whether they are in
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1 favor of the death penalty or opposed relates
2 to how abhorrent the crime is, how esteemed,
3 and rightfully so, by the public because of
4 their role as the guardians of our -- yes, our
5 liberty and our freedom from violence -- it
6 doesn't relate to those issues, it relates to
7 more fundamental issues.
8 So in some respects, I just wanted
9 to explain my vote on this, but it's because
10 of everything I'm going to say about Senator
11 Volker's bill, and it doesn't really relate to
12 the fact that this bill specifies law
13 enforcement officers.
14 So thank you, Mr. President.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
16 Golden, to close.
17 SENATOR GOLDEN: Thank you,
18 Mr. President.
19 I want to thank the colleagues on
20 both sides of the aisle for this debate. I do
21 believe, though, we do need a death penalty
22 here in the state of New York. And I will not
23 give up until we do get a death penalty here
24 in the state of New York. And I'm hoping that
25 some of my colleagues on the other side will
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1 peel off and start to vote for this death
2 penalty.
3 I listened to Senator Diaz's dance
4 between child and senior and police officer
5 when he had no intention of voting for either
6 of those bills anyway. And I listened to
7 Senator Parker's explanation of social
8 services and education, with no intention of
9 voting for the bill, and then listened to it
10 that there's no correlation.
11 Well, I think there is a
12 correlation. I think we look at the state of
13 New York for that correlation. And we look at
14 the early 1990s, where we've seen 2245 people
15 killed in one year in this state. And we see
16 800,000 crimes plus being committed here in
17 the state of New York. And then I see a death
18 penalty come into effect, and I see us down on
19 homicides, to this year to 550, and down on
20 crimes from 800,000 to less than 300,000.
21 And I see the courts throw out the
22 death penalty here in the state of New York,
23 and I start to see portions of the state where
24 crime is going up, and in certain portions of
25 this state where murder is going up. We've
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1 been blessed in that we've been able to hold
2 homicides down to 550 in the city of New York
3 and a little bit more statewide. But I will
4 tell you that it will be short-lived if we do
5 not give those police officers the tools they
6 need to be able to do the job they have to do.
7 You know, we did come together here
8 in this conference, we came together here on
9 both sides and in the Assembly. We did in
10 December. And we passed the Crimes Against
11 Police Act and we passed illegal gun
12 trafficking. So there is a record for us of
13 coming together and working for the betterment
14 of the people of this city and this great
15 state. We can continue to do that, or we can
16 continue to argue.
17 But I will tell you, as I said in
18 my first statement, in the 40 large cities
19 around the nation, 20 of them have seen
20 homicides and murder go up. So I'm going to
21 tell you right now, it's only a matter of
22 time. And when we come here year after year,
23 next year I don't know what you're going to
24 say if crime goes up in the city or state of
25 New York. And I don't know what you're going
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1 to say if we see 10 or 12 police officers
2 killed here in the city or state of New York.
3 But I'm hoping and praying that you
4 will see the value of this bill and that we
5 will do what's right for the families across
6 this city and state.
7 I would ask you all -- and I'm sure
8 this is not part of parliamentary procedure,
9 but I will ask each and every one of you to
10 join with me, whether you're going to vote for
11 this bill or against this bill, to stand and
12 to applaud the service of Joseph Corr, his
13 mother and father in the audience that have
14 listened to this debate. And what I would ask
15 you to do is to applaud his service to this
16 state and to his nation.
17 (Applause.)
18 SENATOR GOLDEN: Thank you, Mr.
19 and Mrs. Corr. And God bless your son,
20 Joseph, and his family.
21 Thank you, Mr. President.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Then
23 the debate is closed.
24 The Secretary will ring the bell.
25 The Secretary will read.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Section 5. This
2 act shall take effect immediately.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Call
4 the roll.
5 (The Secretary called the roll.)
6 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH:
7 Senator Volker, to explain his vote.
8 SENATOR VOLKER: May I explain my
9 vote.
10 For those that don't understand
11 what's going on here, by the way, for -- we
12 just -- Senator Padavan and I did some reforms
13 here because of some criticism in the
14 Legislature. So what just happened here was
15 we have to stop and wait for people to come in
16 and all sorts of stuff that delays the
17 process. But it's the way the system is these
18 days.
19 Let me just say on this bill, first
20 of all -- and I listened, Senator Diaz, to
21 your debate, and I listened -- let me tell you
22 that I used to have the numbers on how more
23 likely it was for a police officer to be
24 killed than the average citizen. Something
25 like 4,000 times as likely.
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1 Police officers, correction
2 officers also, and many peace officers are
3 people that represent society. They are out
4 there in the streets protecting us. The
5 reason for this separate bill has to do with
6 the fact that a lot of people felt that we
7 should stress the fact that these people were
8 particularly vulnerable to assaults.
9 And I'm going to speak on the next
10 bill, and I would like to try to explain some
11 of the things that were said during this bill.
12 But let me just say to you, if I were talking
13 about deterrence, and I am, to dismiss
14 deterrence is foolish, in my opinion. We look
15 at deterrence in every other statute. But we
16 think it doesn't happen because it's killing?
17 Come on.
18 But the issue is I don't know a
19 police officer -- and I know a lot of them. I
20 was one myself. Senator Golden was. I don't
21 know one that doesn't believe that in some
22 cases the death penalty could deter
23 particularly the killing of a police officer.
24 In fact, I know criminals who've
25 told me it did deter them. They've told me
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1 right out that one of the reasons they didn't
2 kill somebody is because of the death penalty.
3 Anyways, let me just say this.
4 This bill -- what would happen is if this bill
5 came in now, with the Court of Appeals
6 decision the way it is, the rest of the death
7 penalty would still remain in abeyance, but
8 police officers, correction officers, and
9 peace officers would be included and this
10 would remedy the so-called deficiency which
11 the Court of Appeals put in place.
12 So let's understand that. It does
13 have a major impact. Nothing would change in
14 the death penalty but that, but it would
15 happen. So I vote aye.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
17 Diaz, to explain his vote.
18 SENATOR DIAZ: Thank you,
19 Mr. President.
20 You know, there are jobs that bring
21 certain privileges and certain dangers.
22 Elected officials, there is privilege and
23 there is danger. You know that by becoming an
24 elected official you're going to have people
25 that are against you and people that are in
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1 favor.
2 Police officers. My daughter
3 became a police officer. I didn't want her to
4 become a police officer; I know the danger.
5 She wanted to become a police officer. A
6 police officer is being given a gun, a
7 bulletproof vest, and they know and she knows
8 the dangers out there.
9 My granddaughter just became 18
10 years old. She just joined the Army,
11 volunteered. She wants to defend and protect
12 the nation. This is my granddaughter, just
13 18 years old. She wants to go to protect and
14 serve. I know the dangers. So the dangers
15 are there.
16 The bodeguero, when he opens the
17 door of the bodega at 5 o'clock in the
18 morning, to be there till 12 o'clock at night,
19 they know the danger. A police officer has a
20 gun and the authority to stop you and to
21 sometimes slap you. The bodegueros don't have
22 those privileges. And the senior citizens
23 don't have that privilege.
24 I support police officers. And I
25 support -- as a pastor, I teach my youth in
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1 the church that they should respect and obey
2 the law at all times. Even the Bible says
3 that you don't want to fear -- that if you
4 obey the law and respect the law, you have
5 nothing to be afraid of. That's what the
6 Bible says.
7 But also, I don't believe in
8 abortion. I don't believe in killing babies,
9 unborn babies. I don't believe in killing
10 anybody, because I deeply respect life in all
11 shapes and forms.
12 Because I do not believe in killing
13 anyone, and because I believe that life is
14 sacred and beautiful, for this reason and for
15 many others, I cannot support and I will not
16 support this bill or any other bill that takes
17 away life.
18 It has nothing to do with the
19 respect of police officers, has nothing to do
20 with the love and attention that they deserve.
21 It has nothing to do -- my daughter could die
22 tomorrow, but I don't believe in the death
23 penalty. I don't believe in killing babies.
24 I don't believe in abortion. I don't believe
25 in those things. Life is beautiful and
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1 sacred, and that's why I'm opposing this bill.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
3 Seward, to explain his vote.
4 SENATOR SEWARD: Briefly,
5 Mr. President.
6 I rise in support of this
7 legislation and also the next bill, Senator
8 Volker's bill, which will correct our death
9 penalty law in the state of New York and
10 reinstate the death penalty for all
11 New Yorkers, and this bill before us for those
12 that kill police officers in our state.
13 I've listened to the debate here
14 today. There have been pros and cons. My
15 decision to support this bill boils down to
16 three simple numbers. In the early 1990s,
17 before we had a death penalty law in New York
18 State, we had 2245 murders in New York State
19 every year. The number had grown to that
20 number.
21 After we passed our death penalty
22 law in the mid-'90s, that number is now down
23 to about 550 murders in New York State every
24 year. Now, that's 550 too many, obviously.
25 But the dramatic decrease in the murder rate
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1 here in the state of New York tells me that
2 the death penalty is not only a deterrent,
3 it's also simple justice.
4 And the other number that sticks
5 out in my mind is last year alone we had four
6 honorable police officers murdered in the --
7 as they carried out their duties on behalf of
8 all of us in the state of New York. And this
9 year, 2006, we're tragically on course to
10 increase that number.
11 And we have in the gallery today,
12 of course, Mr. and Mrs. Corr and members of
13 the New Hartford Police Department, who
14 obviously have suffered a great loss. It's
15 more than a statistic; these are real,
16 honorable people who served us and are now no
17 longer with us.
18 So those numbers alone, the fact
19 we've seen a huge decrease in the murder rate
20 in New York State and, tragically, an increase
21 in the number of police officers being killed
22 in this state, leads me to support this bill
23 and also Senator Volker's bill which will
24 follow. I vote aye.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
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1 Parker, to explain his vote.
2 SENATOR PARKER: Mr. President,
3 to explain my vote.
4 Again, I really admire Senator
5 Golden's intention in putting forth this bill.
6 I think it's an important issue. We certainly
7 need to be providing safety, clearly, in Kings
8 County, in New York City and in the state of
9 New York. But this bill is simply not the way
10 I think we ought to do it.
11 I think things like closing the
12 loophole around gun dealers is one of the
13 steps we ought to be taking. We certainly
14 ought to be expanding and bringing forth a
15 bill to the floor to expand ballistic IDs.
16 But then, if we're going to be
17 looking at what the best thing is to protect
18 law enforcement, particularly in New York City
19 it's to increase the number of first
20 responders we have. We still are, after 9/11,
21 several thousand police officers less than
22 where we were the morning of 9/11. And so
23 certainly putting forward more police officers
24 will certainly, I think, do more to help than
25 the death penalty.
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1 I note that Senator Golden wants to
2 credit the death penalty with reducing crime
3 in the '90s. I think that his Republican
4 colleague Mayor Giuliani, America's Mayor,
5 might disagree with that. I think David
6 Dinkins, with his "Cops and Kids" plan, might
7 disagree with that. I think Ray Kelly, with
8 community policing and COMPSTAT, might
9 disagree with the fact that the death penalty
10 was the number-one reason why crime went down
11 in the city of New York. I think there are a
12 lot of other things we might look at.
13 And I think that as you start
14 calculating the death penalty amongst all
15 those other things that were done around law
16 enforcement during that time, you might find
17 that this was the least effective thing that
18 we could do.
19 So I'm going to vote no and hope
20 that we bring some other bills to the floor
21 that really address this issue.
22 Thank you.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
24 Parker will be recorded in the negative.
25 Announce the results.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Those recorded in
2 the negative on Calendar Number 460 are
3 Senators Andrews, Breslin, Connor, Coppola,
4 Diaz, Dilan, Duane, Gonzalez,
5 Hassell-Thompson, L. Krueger, Montgomery,
6 Oppenheimer, Parker, Paterson, Sabini,
7 Sampson, Savino, Schneiderman, Serrano,
8 A. Smith, M. Smith, Stavisky and Valesky.
9 Absent from voting: Senator C.
10 Kruger.
11 Ayes, 37. Nays, 23.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
13 bill is passed.
14 (Scattered applause.)
15 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
16 Little.
17 SENATOR LITTLE: Thank you,
18 Mr. President. Could we return to Calendar
19 455, please.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: The
21 Secretary will read.
22 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
23 455, by Senator Volker, Senate Print 2727, an
24 act to amend the Criminal Procedure Law.
25 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON:
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1 Explanation.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
3 Volker, an explanation has been requested.
4 SENATOR VOLKER: Yeah,
5 Mr. President, you know, this is always -- the
6 people that know my history, I guess, realize
7 that I have a very, very strong feeling on the
8 death penalty.
9 It's not that I feel that we should
10 execute tons of people or anything. But I
11 can't help but remember, and I guess because
12 of the history of my family -- and by the way,
13 I was one who recommended that we do Senator
14 Golden's bill first, because of the family
15 being here, and I thought it would be better
16 that they didn't have to sit through the
17 entire proceeding or whatever. I mean, you
18 know, not that it wouldn't be educating.
19 But what's fascinating about this
20 issue is -- and I realize we all have our own
21 feeling about it. See, it wouldn't matter to
22 me -- and some fellow talked to me and said,
23 "You know, the support for the death penalty
24 is down." I said: "Oh, that's nice. Okay."
25 And he said, "Does have that any impact on
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1 your feeling?" I said, "Look. I support the
2 death penalty because I believe it is a
3 deterrent." I know it's a deterrent. It's
4 not a belief. It's not even an issue.
5 I'll never forget my father coming
6 home in 1965 after he had fought the battle
7 against the majority of the Bartlett
8 Commission, which Nelson Rockefeller set up to
9 abolish the death penalty. Which is what he
10 did. And my father opposed it.
11 What he said was, number one, the
12 murder rate will soar now. Which of course he
13 was totally right. Number two, he made an
14 interesting observation and he said now
15 abortion will come out, because they're
16 indelibly linked. Because when you abolish
17 the death penalty, if people are willing to
18 allow innocent people, in effect, to die from
19 the hands of killers, the guilty, why would
20 they not be willing to allow the innocent to
21 die?
22 What a terrible condemnation, in a
23 way. I listened to Reverend Diaz, and it was
24 fascinating.
25 In 1965, the murder rate was 837.
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1 Now, in 1966 -- and this was after the death
2 penalty was abolished -- it was 876. You know
3 what it was last year? 874. So one year
4 after the death penalty was abolished, two
5 more people were murdered than last year. Of
6 course, then in 1967, 1,009; 1968, 1231; 1969,
7 1400. It went all the way to 2600.
8 I think what we have to understand
9 is not every murder is deterrable. Of course
10 it's not. Nobody ever said that.
11 Particularly, I think, the murders of police
12 officers, and there's lots of reasons for it,
13 are potentially deterrable.
14 But to say that there's no evidence
15 of deterrence -- the reason there's no
16 evidence of deterrence for those that oppose
17 the death penalty is because they beat every
18 study they could find to show it wasn't.
19 It's like Massachusetts. My good
20 friend Eric talked about Massachusetts and
21 these nine principles. One thing he didn't
22 mention -- I don't know how many people have
23 read the Massachusetts death penalty statute.
24 I can tell you it doesn't have anywhere near
25 as many protections in it as we do in ours.
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1 I have talked to death penalty
2 advocates from around the country, and they
3 privately admit to me that if they had to have
4 a death penalty legislation, they would like
5 ours. There's no bill in the country -- for
6 instance, we provide more training and more
7 money for defense than any legislation in any
8 state in the country. And I won't read you
9 all the different provisions in it. It's kind
10 of impressive, I think, and I'm proud of it.
11 I must tell you a story about what
12 we're fixing here so that everybody
13 understands. This bill basically does the
14 same fix, so to speak -- it takes out the
15 provision that the Court of Appeals says was
16 wrong and replaces it with what they say is
17 right.
18 Now, personally, I don't buy the
19 Court of Appeals language at all. This was a
20 bunch of people, four people, that didn't have
21 the courage to allow the death penalty. These
22 were the same people that said the Legislature
23 shouldn't have as much as power as the
24 Governor. We -- the Court of Appeals,
25 probably the most pro-criminal Court of
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1 Appeals in the country, if you look at what
2 they've done -- because this Legislature and
3 this house -- you can be proud of the fact
4 that this house, Democrat and Republican --
5 and by the way, one of your members said "the
6 Democrats." A lot of you have voted for the
7 death penalty. A lot of you have voted for
8 tough criminal statutes.
9 This house, in my humble opinion,
10 is the anchor of criminal justice in this
11 state. When George took over -- I'm talking
12 about the Governor -- we said, Give us the
13 tools and we'll deal with it.
14 No state in the union has ever seen
15 a decline in crime as this state has. Never
16 in homicide the way it has. It's now,
17 however, starting to angle up. We all know
18 that. We've been seeing it, and we knew it
19 was coming.
20 Yeah, we had the death penalty, and
21 we had tough criminal statutes. Because when
22 the death penalty passes, tough criminal
23 statutes virtually automatically go with it.
24 There was a gentleman sitting right
25 here who was a good friend of mine -- I won't
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1 say who he was. But back in the '70s, when we
2 were going to have the big argument with my
3 good friend -- and he was my good friend --
4 Mario Cuomo, he had a bill in that would
5 reduce the life term to 8 years. Well, in
6 other words, you could get out after 8 years.
7 It was 18, it would be 8 years.
8 They got so petrified over the
9 death penalty, he put in another bill that
10 made life without parole. And I pointed out
11 to him, I said, you know, "It's a little
12 contradictory, don't you think?" But they
13 were so frightened of the death penalty.
14 If people are so frightened of the
15 death penalty in -- out there, the liberal
16 people, the people that spend millions and
17 millions of dollars against the death penalty,
18 these groups that are so afraid -- by the way,
19 I got calls today from people around the
20 country. Whenever we do this bill, whenever
21 we deal with the death penalty, don't kid
22 yourselves, this is a national issue. Our
23 criminal justice system may be one of the best
24 in the country. I think it's the best.
25 We've participated in debates, and
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1 this debate, this is the first of a number.
2 Let me tell you, we're going to get another
3 Court of Appeals judge, if things work out the
4 way they should, we will do the fix, and the
5 Assembly eventually will do it. Maybe not
6 now, although if they don't do a couple of
7 other things, they're going to have a big
8 problem.
9 And by the way, Eric asked about
10 hearings. And I confess, I said on this floor
11 I was going to do hearings. You know why I
12 didn't do it? Because we got involved in so
13 many other issues here -- sexual predator
14 legislation, all these things -- that have
15 turned out to be in some ways to be more
16 important.
17 The reason we ended up in December
18 on the issue of police killings had to do with
19 the death of two New York City police
20 officers. And it was great that we were able
21 to do that, except for one thing. When two
22 cops in upstate New York got killed, nobody
23 paid too much attention. In fact, one
24 newspaper, one group, Gannett News, did pay
25 attention. I give them credit.
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1 It aggravates me to think, though,
2 that cops in my area, in upstate New York,
3 weren't as important as other police officers.
4 And I think, you know -- I mean, I know that.
5 We realize that the media doesn't like this.
6 Oh, it doesn't sound good.
7 But ladies and gentlemen of the
8 Senate, justice -- let's remember what justice
9 is. Justice says that people get their due.
10 It doesn't necessarily mean that we go after
11 people, but it means that there ought to be a
12 penalty available for those people that commit
13 heinous crimes that fit the crimes.
14 You know, I'm going to finish by
15 telling you something that I haven't said to
16 too many people, and you can believe this or
17 not. I'm a practicing Roman Catholic. I
18 firmly believe that the Catholic Church of
19 this country really made a big mistake and in
20 fact probably unwittingly promoted abortion.
21 When I was over in Europe with my
22 daughter in Krakow, Poland, I went to
23 Auschwitz and to Bergdorf [sic] and saw the --
24 what was there, the murders and the brutality,
25 the hair of people, the shoes. It was hard
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1 for me to even think about what happened
2 there. I mean, man's inhumanity to man, that
3 this happened in our century.
4 But then it dawned on me why the
5 Pope opposed the death penalty in Europe. He
6 was absolutely right. I wouldn't want a death
7 penalty in Europe either. Just as I wouldn't
8 have wanted a death penalty in the South in
9 the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, and maybe for a
10 while in Illinois. Because they went over the
11 edge.
12 And because remember, in Europe,
13 people -- juries don't execute people, the
14 government does. In this country, the freest
15 country in the world, juries make the
16 decisions.
17 Our Court of Appeals doesn't like
18 our juries. They said, Well, you know, they
19 could be influenced by the way that this death
20 penalty is drawn up.
21 In all honesty, the fix we're doing
22 is probably as much my fault as anybody's. I
23 thought it was -- tended to be more, the way
24 it was, more pro-inmate. Give them the
25 chance. Because I always took the attitude,
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1 you give them the opportunity. The better
2 make sure that person is guilty. You want to
3 make sure that that jury decides that person
4 should get the death penalty before you --
5 before there's any chance.
6 Not one person in the history of
7 this state has ever been found not guilty with
8 any kind of definition after they were
9 executed. In fact, let me tell you something.
10 The attitude that there's bias and race --
11 we've studied the whole thing -- absolutely
12 false in this state. I don't care about the
13 rest of the country, you can say what you
14 want.
15 Although I will tell you a couple
16 of things that are fascinating. And that is
17 that there was a study done of people who were
18 found exonerated at a national level.
19 Prosecutors from around the United States --
20 California attorney general, state attorneys
21 general -- all these people went and they
22 looked at a hundred cases that were innocent,
23 people were found innocent.
24 What they found is that the
25 majority were reconvicted of the same charges.
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1 They also found that some of the people
2 exonerated were guilty, but the problem was
3 that the evidence was thrown out for one
4 reason or another.
5 I'm told that the DNA cases in
6 Illinois, at least half of them committed the
7 crimes. And the reason is, you got to
8 remember, DNA eliminates the evidence. It
9 doesn't necessarily mean that people are
10 totally innocent. They may have still
11 committed the crimes.
12 One guy who was let out was
13 immediately grabbed by the people in the next
14 state because the evidence showed that he
15 killed the person who he was found innocent of
16 just after he killed another person related to
17 him in another state.
18 So you have to be really be
19 careful. The media tells you part of the
20 story, not the whole story.
21 We in this state abhor the
22 possibility that a person could be executed
23 that's innocent. And we do everything we can
24 to make sure. That's not what the Court of
25 Appeals judges did. What they said is -- the
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1 same judges who made a decision that said our
2 Legislature is not capable of being equal to
3 the Governor. That's basically what they
4 said. That's why we're still here fighting
5 over the budget -- they said juries are not
6 capable of understanding, so we're going to
7 make a change.
8 Well, fine, this bill changes back
9 to what they claim they will do. Hopefully,
10 by the time the new charges are laid against
11 people and so forth, we'll have a different
12 Court of Appeals which will have the courage
13 to withstand the statute that we will send to
14 them and that the new governor, probably --
15 because I want to warn everybody here, I
16 assume everybody here realizes that both
17 gubernatorial candidates are pro-death
18 penalty. In case you don't know it, they are.
19 So if you think that this issue is not going
20 to come back, it is.
21 And today we're going to pass this
22 bill that does the overall fix to the death
23 penalty. But don't let anybody kid you that
24 those law professors who are anti-death
25 penalty who testified at the Assembly
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1 hearings -- which they wouldn't even let
2 everybody who was pro-death penalty testify.
3 They did the hearings to show you shouldn't be
4 for the death penalty. That's why they did
5 them. We all knew that.
6 And Marty Connor and I were
7 talking; if you're opposed, you're opposed.
8 If you're in favor, you're in favor. I mean,
9 you can make all the -- so that's the way it
10 is.
11 So anyways, let me just say, my
12 colleagues, whether there's less support for
13 the death penalty today than there was some
14 time ago -- why is that? Well, because the
15 murder rate is way down. And the media has
16 been pounding away, and the anti-death penalty
17 people have been making movies and they're on
18 television. But there is a steady
19 undercurrent of two-thirds of New York
20 people -- no one who voted for the death
21 penalty in this chamber who was there in '94
22 is going to have a problem if he votes for --
23 or she votes for it again.
24 Because those people that now say
25 they might prefer life without parole, they're
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1 not going to vote against you because you vote
2 for it. What they're saying is well, you
3 know, we might just do -- yeah, sure. The
4 truth is that's what people want you to
5 believe.
6 The people of this state have
7 spoken time after time after time. They want
8 justice. And if we're going to get justice,
9 we need a death penalty to make sure that the
10 most heinous of criminals have the threat over
11 their heads.
12 So all I can say is whether it's a
13 police officer, who I think needs defense more
14 than anybody -- whoever it is, we do need the
15 death penalty in place in this state.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
17 Balboni.
18 SENATOR BALBONI: Mr. President,
19 I have listened to the debate on the prior
20 statute, and I'm listening to this. And this
21 debate and the one that came before it is
22 frustrating.
23 And it's frustrating from two
24 perspectives. The first is that we are
25 debating the wrong thing. If you're speaking
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1 specifically on the bill that is before us for
2 consideration, Senator Volker's bill and
3 Senator Golden's bill, then the debate on
4 whether or not the death penalty should be the
5 law in New York State is irrelevant.
6 In fact, if we were in a court of
7 law, I would bet you anything that a judge
8 would rule us out of order. Because the law
9 of the State of New York today is that there
10 is a death penalty.
11 In 2004, the Court of Appeals in
12 the case of People v. LaValle spoke to one
13 very small and specific section of a law that
14 had been debated and argued about for nearly a
15 decade. And I participated in those debates,
16 as did Winner and Robach and Nozzolio, in the
17 Assembly, and Bonacic and Flanagan. We were
18 all there. And we remember the chambers
19 humming with tension and emotion over the
20 issue. And when George Pataki becomes
21 Governor in 1995, this state decides to enact
22 a death penalty.
23 What is so frustrating about
24 today's debate is that because of a
25 technicality -- and if you read the
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1 commentaries of the Court of Appeals, you know
2 it is a technicality. They don't talk about
3 the requirement of proof as being
4 insufficient. They don't talk about the jury
5 deliberations as being insufficient under law.
6 They don't talk about the threshold crimes you
7 must commit in order to be subject to the
8 death penalty as being constitutionally
9 insufficient. None of that. Especially that
10 one-line little paragraph that when you said
11 to a jury if it didn't do this, then this
12 might happen. And that was the infirmity.
13 Now, why am I frustrated?
14 Everybody has the right -- it's the
15 Legislature; we can talk about anything,
16 whether it's relevant or not. But when you
17 hear Senator Diaz and Senator Parker and
18 Senator Schneiderman talking about the merits
19 of their feelings, we're kind of missing the
20 point.
21 And I would actually challenge the
22 opponents to this bill who want to vote no.
23 Hey, folks, it's the day of transparency. So
24 if you really want to express your objections
25 to this legislation, you must offer an
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1 amendment to repeal the death penalty in the
2 State of New York. Short of that, you're not
3 affecting the debate positively. Because, my
4 colleagues, that's the debate. Because the
5 law still exists today.
6 What a court, an unelected court
7 has done is they've superseded our judgment.
8 They've said, No, no, we don't care about what
9 the people, duly elected, think. We're going
10 to usurp your ability to affect criminal
11 justice. We're going to ignore the fact --
12 whether you believe the death penalty actually
13 is a deterrent or not, the one thing you
14 cannot argue in the face of the statistics is
15 that it actually increases crime. It does
16 not. That's the one thing you can't say.
17 Now, you say, Well, Balboni, why
18 are you bringing that up? That's so absurd.
19 Believe it or not, when I was in the Assembly,
20 '90, '91, '92, '93, that's what they all said,
21 that if we enact the death penalty, we're
22 going to increase the rate of crime. They
23 actually said that. But it didn't happen.
24 Mr. President, I'm voting for this
25 because it was the people's intent and the
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1 will of this Legislature in 1995 to enact the
2 death penalty, to provide some safety not only
3 for police officers and court officers and
4 people who run the jails but the private
5 citizen on the street. We should effectuate
6 that.
7 My colleagues, I challenge you.
8 Bring an amendment. Let's have the debate on
9 the death penalty in the proper forum. But
10 let's not take this technical amendment and
11 further the sham the way the Assembly has
12 done.
13 Folks, this is a very serious
14 issue. If it's time to revisit the efficacy
15 of this proposal, then let's do that. But not
16 in the context of some hypertechnicality that
17 the lords of the court have decided to visit
18 upon us.
19 Thank you, Mr. President.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Thank
21 you, Senator Balboni.
22 Senator Duane.
23 SENATOR DUANE: Thank you,
24 Mr. President. On the bill.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: On the
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1 bill.
2 SENATOR DUANE: I want to state
3 for the record that I am a hundred percent
4 morally and ethically opposed to the death
5 penalty. I believe that it is wrong, and I
6 would vote against any bill that would bring
7 the death penalty to New York State.
8 But let's be honest about what's
9 happening here. And this is before my time
10 here, though I followed it as a person who
11 opposed the death penalty. The Governor, the
12 Senate had a chance to draft a good bill, if
13 you want to call it that. If there's any such
14 thing as a good death penalty bill. And
15 unfortunately, it wasn't good enough to
16 pass -- or I should say from my point of view,
17 fortunately, it wasn't good enough to pass the
18 Court of Appeals' scrutiny. So basically the
19 Senate blew it.
20 I mean, what the Court of Appeals
21 was saying was that the bill was flawed, that
22 it was badly drafted. And it was overturned.
23 And actually, that's probably a lesson to the
24 Senate that maybe the best way to draft
25 legislation, particularly legislation of this
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1 importance, is to do it after plenty of
2 hearings.
3 I also think it would be kind of
4 inappropriate to have the Court of Appeals
5 come and debate the bill with us. It would be
6 like having the Governor come and debate the
7 bill. There's a separation of powers. But
8 there is a reason that we have a Court of
9 Appeals, and that's so that they can see
10 whether or not our laws are fair and
11 well-written and can be properly used in our
12 courts of law.
13 So apparently and obviously what
14 happened was the bill didn't pass muster. And
15 you know what? There really is no going back.
16 We're not going to pass a death penalty in
17 this Legislature. It's not just going to
18 happen. So -- I mean, I understand why people
19 want to go on the record or they want to put
20 people on the record on this. But basically,
21 that's all it is, and anything else about it
22 is pretty much a waste of time.
23 So it's a puzzlement to me why we
24 would be wasting our time debating this bill
25 today when it has no chance of going through
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1 the Legislature, no chance of actually
2 arriving on the Governor's desk, when frankly
3 we could be passing legislation that really
4 could go to the Governor's desk. And that,
5 for instance, Timothy's Law.
6 You know, the death penalty
7 experiment is over in New York State. But I
8 can guarantee you that when we pass Timothy's
9 Law, that won't be an experiment. That will
10 be something that will really change people's
11 lives, and it will be something that people
12 will be able to use forever in this state.
13 You know, I just have to say -- now
14 maybe I'm a little bit guilty of it as well --
15 the only thing that it really could be said
16 that we're doing here is killing time, not
17 making for a bill that's going to make it
18 possible for the state to kill a person.
19 You know, the death penalty brings
20 up a host of emotions and issues which, now
21 that the gate is open, people have been
22 talking about here. And let's face it, one of
23 the issues that the death penalty will bring
24 up, for both the person who would be put to
25 death under the bill and for the families of
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1 the victim, are mental health issues.
2 Let me just mention something about
3 this. Does the death penalty help victims
4 heal? Well, there was a gentleman, Mr. Welch,
5 from Oklahoma City, whose daughter, whose only
6 daughter, Julie Marie Welch, was murdered in
7 the Oklahoma City bombing. Which, by the way,
8 was a terrorist attack by an American
9 Caucasian and, tragically, a New Yorker
10 originally as well, in case anybody forgot who
11 that terrorist was. I believe raised either
12 Protestant or Catholic, also, not Islamic.
13 Anyway, Mr. Welch, who lost his
14 only daughter in the Oklahoma City bombing,
15 you know what happened to him? He spent all
16 of his grieving time and time in the future
17 after the bombing medicating his pain with
18 alcohol. And not only did the death penalty
19 not bring his daughter back, but the death
20 penalty didn't provide treatment for his
21 alcohol addiction.
22 You know what would provide
23 treatment for his alcohol addiction?
24 Treatment for alcohol addiction. Which is in
25 Timothy's Law. Which we could do in this
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1 session in this Legislature and put it on the
2 Governor's desk for a signature.
3 So alcohol didn't take care of
4 Mr. Welch's pain, the death penalty he said
5 would not take care of his pain. But you know
6 what? A little bit of counseling probably
7 would have taken care of his pain. Maybe not
8 forever, and maybe not completely alleviate
9 it, but certainly help him through the pain.
10 Now, you know, while we're on the
11 topic of the pain of family members of
12 murdered people, there's Pat Webdale, the
13 mother of Kendra Webdale, who was pushed to
14 her death in front of a New York City subway
15 train by a mentally ill man in 1997. You
16 know, the Webdale family campaigned for
17 Kendra's Law, which facilitates mandated
18 treatment for those with serious mental
19 illness.
20 But if that family of Kendra's
21 murderer had had access under Timothy's Law to
22 mental health treatment, perhaps that tragedy
23 could have been avoided. And part of Kendra's
24 Law mandates treatment for those with serious
25 mental illnesses. Well, maybe we should
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1 provide optional mental health services for
2 people with mental illness before they murder
3 someone or before they're mandated into
4 treatment because of our law.
5 Now, Senator Padavan had a bill
6 earlier on today which says that a person
7 could be guilty but mentally ill. Well, I
8 don't know what we could do about the guilty
9 part of it, but certainly we could help with
10 the mentally ill part of it if we had a
11 Timothy's Law in New York State, which is
12 something we could do today, actually get
13 accomplished, get it to the Governor's desk.
14 Unlike a death penalty bill, which
15 is going nowhere. Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere.
16 Not going anywhere. Death penalty not going
17 anywhere; Timothy's Law could be on a path to
18 the Governor's desk.
19 You know, one of the things that we
20 know is that -- and studies have shown this,
21 and it's something that actually was raised
22 today by Senator Spano's bill on stalking and
23 domestic violence, "prohibits employers from
24 discriminating against victims of the domestic
25 violence or stalking."
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1 I'm sure many of you know that
2 stalking and domestic violence often escalates
3 into murder. Right? Murder of a spouse,
4 murder of a domestic partner, murder of a
5 stalking victim.
6 And yet we know that stalking is
7 yet another sign of mental illness and
8 something that potentially could be treated,
9 and people that have that problem could
10 actually get treatment and not have it
11 escalate to the point of murdering a victim if
12 in New York State we had a Timothy's Law.
13 Isn't it better to treat someone
14 with this kind of an illness before they
15 commit a murder, rather than just prosecuting
16 them after the murder? Makes sense to me.
17 And yet we're spending time here on
18 a bill that's going to go nowhere when we have
19 a bill, Timothy's Law, which actually could go
20 somewhere.
21 You know, there's lots and lots of
22 science on the issue of depression and what
23 happens with it. There are studies on the
24 impact of depression and people on welfare not
25 being able to get to work because of that.
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1 More treatment would mean more research, more
2 money going into research of mental illness,
3 more people could be helped.
4 You know, in New York State, even
5 if you are a person who under the pieces of
6 legislation we see put before us today -- in
7 the period of time when someone is
8 incarcerated under the bills that are being
9 proposed today, Senator Volker's bill and
10 Senator Golden's bill, when a person is
11 incarcerated they could potentially end up in
12 a special housing unit.
13 And you know what we do in New York
14 State with mentally ill people? We warehouse
15 them in prisons and most of them end up in
16 special housing units, a place where persons
17 who potentially could get the death penalty
18 might end up as well. That's what we do with
19 people in prison, we put them in special
20 housing units instead of getting them
21 treatment for mental illness.
22 And some people actually get
23 released from special housing units right into
24 the world, oftentimes without Medicaid
25 benefits and no access to mental health
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1 services, which I say perhaps they should have
2 been getting before they were incarcerated,
3 while they were incarcerated, and after they
4 get out. And if we had Timothy's Law, we
5 could have that.
6 But instead of talking about
7 Timothy's Law, we're talking about the death
8 penalty, which has no chance of passing when
9 Timothy's Law actually has a chance of
10 passing.
11 Now, Massachusetts does not have a
12 death penalty. But I want to talk about
13 another case of where potentially the death
14 penalty could apply. And that's the case of
15 Father Geoghan, who was accused of molesting
16 many children over decades. Who I would also
17 say, though he probably had access to mental
18 health care -- because the Catholic Church I
19 think provides healthcare for -- I know for
20 priests, I'm not sure about nuns, but
21 definitely for priests, parish priests,
22 diocesan priests. Anyway, he didn't get the
23 treatment he needed and he went on and he
24 continued to molest children.
25 And he was incarcerated for
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1 10 years on the one charge that they got him
2 on, although they stopped after they got this
3 because he got a 10-year sentence for
4 inappropriately touching a boy in swimming
5 hole. And off he went to prison, to
6 protective custody. Probably in New York
7 State he would have been put in a special
8 housing unit, because it was the kind of place
9 where he was only allowed a little bit of the
10 time.
11 And then he was murdered by a young
12 man who was a white supremacist, I would say
13 probably of the terrorist category as well.
14 And Father Geoghan was murdered by this, you
15 know, Aryan Nation guy, Joseph Druce, and he
16 was murdered in prison.
17 And, you know, because of where
18 this happened, the circumstances, this Joseph
19 Druce probably would be eligible for the death
20 penalty. Right? And to what good? Would
21 that have stopped these kids from being
22 molested earlier on by Father Geoghan? No.
23 Probably what would have stopped
24 him was if the Catholic Church had recognized
25 that they had members of the clergy who were
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1 doing terrible things and should be moved
2 around and should be stopped from doing
3 terrible things. But of course we haven't
4 even passed comprehensive clergy abuse stuff
5 in this Legislature yet, which we could
6 actually pass and get onto the Governor's
7 desk. But instead, the death penalty.
8 Which, you know, this is the end of
9 the line here in the Senate. It's not moving
10 past here. This is it. It's not going
11 anywhere after this. So all the things that
12 we're not doing that we could be doing, but
13 instead we're debating a bill which is going
14 nowhere fast.
15 So, you know, the death penalty,
16 who is that going to help? It's not going to
17 stop the crime from being committed. It's not
18 going to really give most families the kind of
19 closure that they need. You know, it's not
20 going to do any of those things.
21 But what we could be doing to help
22 people is passing a Timothy's Law. What we
23 could be doing is passing a comprehensive
24 package of clergy abuse bills which not only
25 would give some closure to victims, give them
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1 a chance to have a day in court, but would
2 also, I hope, make it so that cycle wouldn't
3 continue. Because, you know, when we heard
4 from victims, it wasn't about the money, it
5 was about two things: One, acknowledgment
6 that what happened to them had actually
7 happened to them; and the other thing to stop
8 it from happening to people in the future.
9 So in a weird kind of way, the
10 death penalty doesn't even give people the
11 acknowledgement that the person is actually
12 guilty. I mean, we don't know any more than
13 what might happen in court. And we know of
14 people who are, because of the advances in DNA
15 technology and other things -- that actually
16 were at risk of being given the death penalty
17 but turned out to be innocent. But if they're
18 dead, they're not going to be able to come
19 back.
20 So again, who is getting helped
21 here? Not the families, who again it doesn't
22 give them closure too. And yet we could help
23 them if we provided mental health services
24 through Timothy's Law, so that everybody in
25 New York State could get access to mental
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1 health services. You know, those are things
2 that we really could be doing here.
3 You know, for the last, I think
4 it's like five years now -- or I don't know
5 how many years, but for a while. You know,
6 the years just kind of flow into each other
7 here -- we've been wasting our time on
8 one-house death penalty bills. And we could
9 actually be working on bills that have a
10 chance of getting passed by both houses and
11 onto the Governor's desk, like a Timothy's
12 Law.
13 You know, we have one and a half
14 weeks left. We could have had -- you know, if
15 we were going to do this debate, we could have
16 done it in January, we could have done it in
17 February, when we weren't actually doing a
18 whole lot around here. Right? And then now
19 we could really be at the table getting laws
20 passed that would really help people, like
21 Timothy's Law.
22 One and a half weeks left. One and
23 a half weeks left to help all New Yorkers, to
24 help every New York family to have access to
25 things that they need. I don't really see
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1 that they're clamoring for the death penalty.
2 I think what they want is parity for mental
3 health care. I hear from lots and lots of
4 families that say we really need this for our
5 family, we need this for our children.
6 I mean, we've heard from Timothy's
7 dad. He really could have used this bill, and
8 this bill would have saved the life of his son
9 Timothy. The death penalty wouldn't have
10 saved his son. What potentially could have
11 saved his son? Timothy's Law. Access to
12 mental health care. That could have saved his
13 son. Not the death penalty. Nope, not the
14 death penalty. Mental health parity,
15 Timothy's Law, that would have saved the life
16 of his son. Right?
17 And in a week and a half, we could
18 actually make that right. We can't and I
19 don't think we should fix the death penalty,
20 because no matter how much we try to fix it,
21 it ain't going anywhere. Not going anywhere
22 this year.
23 Timothy's Law, Timothy's Law could
24 go to this year. Timothy's Law could pass.
25 We could help people get the mental health
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1 treatment that they really, really need. It
2 might help it so that we wouldn't have to keep
3 warehousing seriously mentally ill people in
4 prisons and in special housing units.
5 We could make it so that victims of
6 clergy abuse could get redress, could stop
7 that horrible cycle. We could provide mental
8 health for families and victims of clergy
9 abuse. We could help people before they're
10 incarcerated. But no. Nope, we're not doing
11 that. We're not doing Timothy's Law, just the
12 death penalty.
13 So a week and a half. Let's stop
14 wasting our time on one-house bills that are
15 just trying to fix bills that got rejected
16 because they're poorly drafted and, frankly,
17 people were pretty darn ambivalent about it to
18 begin with. Let's do something that we know
19 that people feel strongly about on both sides
20 of the aisle, on both sides of the aisle.
21 Timothy's Law has overwhelming
22 support on both sides of the aisle in both
23 houses, and the overwhelming support of
24 New Yorkers. Why don't we do something for
25 New Yorkers? Why don't we do something for
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1 New York families? Why don't we make sure
2 that every New Yorker gets access to mental
3 health treatment?
4 I'm going to vote no on this bill,
5 and I encourage my colleagues to do that. But
6 I encourage my colleagues to make it possible
7 for us all to vote yes on Timothy's Law.
8 Thank you, Mr. President.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
10 Bonacic.
11 SENATOR BONACIC: Thank you,
12 Mr. President.
13 First I want to thank our
14 colleagues. I guess you're all battle-weary.
15 We've been hearing about the death penalty now
16 for almost two hours and 20 minutes. Just --
17 I want to be very brief and I want to try and
18 say a couple of things that haven't been said
19 in the last two hours and 15 minutes.
20 I first came to the Assembly in
21 1990 in a special election. And when I ran,
22 people said that I was going to be the 100th
23 vote to override Governor Cuomo's veto of the
24 death penalty in the Assembly. And Speaker
25 Miller at the time was there.
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1 To make a long story short, today,
2 16 years later, there is more opposition to
3 the death penalty. And that's okay, because
4 people's views on a particular issue change.
5 And it's reflected by their elected officials.
6 There's been criticism, why are we
7 standing up here on a one-house bill when we
8 could be doing bills that are closer to
9 getting done by two houses. And I respect
10 that statement.
11 However, the issue of justice and
12 to change the momentum back to where it was
13 could start today, knowing that two people
14 running for Governor on both sides of the
15 aisle want the death penalty reinstated.
16 But having said all of that, I try
17 to understand why people would vote no, not
18 only on the death penalty but on many criminal
19 issues. For example, eliminating the statute
20 of limitations on the rape of women.
21 Expanding DNA testing for criminals that have
22 been arrested. GPS monitoring of third-level
23 predators. Civil confinement of third-level
24 predators. There's resistance on all that
25 litigation.
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1 So you wonder why, why is there
2 resistance. And this is the two things that I
3 could figure out. When I heard Senator Parker
4 speak, he said, in so many words, it's not
5 individual responsibility that causes someone
6 to kill, it's the failure of society.
7 The failure of society, whether it
8 be housing, whether it be in a good education,
9 whether it be in a home nurturing, whether it
10 be in opportunity for jobs. It's not the
11 individual's fault, it's society's fault. And
12 therefore, when that individual kills, whether
13 he kills a police officer, a child, a senior
14 citizen, he should not be put to death.
15 And I disagree with that value
16 system, that judgment. So that's why I
17 support the two death penalty bills of Senator
18 Golden and Senator Volker.
19 The second reason why people oppose
20 this legislation, it was suggested spiritual
21 grounds. Some people believe in redemption,
22 that no human being is totally evil and
23 they're capable of being rehabilitated.
24 That's a value judgment. I disagree with
25 that.
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1 I think, like Senator Meier, some
2 people may not at birth be evil but they
3 became evil. And I'll just take three or four
4 categories. The terrorists that took out the
5 two Twin Towers. The drug dealers, the big
6 drug dealers that order indiscriminate
7 killing. Gang leaders that order
8 indiscriminate killing. The serial killers,
9 admitted killers through confessions, they are
10 evil. And for the protection of society in
11 the prison -- Senator Nozzolio talked about
12 that -- then that's another reason for the
13 death penalty.
14 But you never know why someone
15 votes no unless you walk in that person's
16 shoes. Okay?
17 Now, we talk of class differences,
18 we talk of minority differences and how people
19 are treated. Well, let me tell you, there are
20 a lot of poor Caucasians that don't have
21 housing, don't have educational opportunities,
22 don't have job opportunities, as well as
23 Hispanic, Asian and Afro-American.
24 Never, never, never does it give an
25 individual the right to kill. In my humble
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1 opinion, in my value judgments. But what is
2 disturbing to me from what I heard not so much
3 on the death penalty is the great divide, how
4 different groups look at police officers, how
5 they look at authority. And that is a bigger
6 problem than the bill we're debating today.
7 On movies and television they talk
8 of Afro-Americans, Hispanics, other minorities
9 not trusting the police officer. He's the bad
10 guy. Now, that goes to the morals of our
11 society and what keeps America strong. I just
12 call it the great divide. And we, we, both of
13 us, on both sides of the aisle -- because I
14 know every elected official here is
15 well-intentioned, is a humanitarian, wants to
16 help humanity and human beings, or you
17 wouldn't be in this job. You want to do the
18 right thing.
19 And we have different views on how
20 to get there. But we collectively have to
21 work on the great divide and how we can make
22 it smaller and smaller and eventually make it
23 disappear, so we can make America stronger.
24 Because we need every American pulling for
25 America and not fighting each other.
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1 I vote yes. I did on the police
2 bill, I'm voting yes on this bill.
3 Thank you, Mr. President.
4 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Thank
5 you.
6 Senator Onorato.
7 SENATOR ONORATO: Mr. President,
8 will Senator Volker yield for a question,
9 please.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
11 Volker, will you yield?
12 SENATOR VOLKER: Certainly.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH:
14 Continue.
15 SENATOR ONORATO: You mentioned
16 the fact that we revisited the death penalty
17 on numerous occasions and the courts have
18 interceded on most of these occasions, making
19 it necessary for us to come and revisit it.
20 Now, the very latest stumbling
21 block was just very, very recently, with the
22 United States Supreme Court now making it okay
23 for a person awaiting the death penalty to now
24 challenge it on grounds that it's cruel and
25 inhumane treatment by injection.
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1 Now, what method of the death
2 penalty is in this bill that would satisfy the
3 court that it's not cruel and inhumane? I
4 mean, I can't possibly envision any particular
5 way that it's not cruel or inhumane, depending
6 on how you look at it. Is it fast and simple,
7 or is it a slow death?
8 SENATOR VOLKER: Senator, first
9 of all, that's a challenge which I'm sure is
10 going to go down. The Supreme Court hasn't
11 ruled that any of the execution methods that
12 I'm aware of are cruel and unusual punishment.
13 We have gone from the electric chair because
14 of squeamish people -- mostly in New York
15 City, I'll be honest with you -- to lethal
16 injection.
17 Lethal injection is still allowed
18 everywhere in this country that I'm aware of.
19 Some states, by the way, use hanging. I think
20 the biggest problem with methods has not to do
21 with the person but more to do with people
22 that are watching. I really do believe that.
23 We did a hearing on this, a couple of
24 hearings.
25 But the answer is it's almost
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1 inconceivable that our Supreme Court would
2 rule in favor of that objection. Remember,
3 there have been tons of objections to the
4 death penalty for -- I mean, everybody objects
5 to the death penalty, especially the
6 anti-death penalty people. Many of them feel
7 it's wrong and therefore whatever they do is
8 okay. Some of them.
9 And by the way, the people in this
10 chamber that are opposed to the death penalty,
11 I hope you understand I am not talking about
12 us. And there are many people who
13 legitimately oppose the death penalty. And
14 this chamber has had lusty debates -- "lusty"
15 is probably not a good word, but you
16 understand what I mean -- on this issue for
17 many years. And we've had very good debates.
18 I think my discouragement is in
19 people who give numbers, some law professors
20 who give phoney, phoney numbers. And that
21 really does bother me. I think that -- I
22 believe in truth. And truth -- the old saying
23 is the truth will make you free. And you make
24 a point. There are challenges, and it could
25 be a problem.
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1 No court has ever ruled this
2 statute unconstitutional. The statute that we
3 have here is formulated out of a bunch of
4 statutes across the country that have all been
5 declared constitutional. The method? For the
6 most part, the Supreme Court has stayed away
7 from method issues. But the chances of the
8 Supreme Court of the United States finding in
9 favor of lethal injection I think is virtually
10 zero. But if they do, it could give us a
11 problem, that's true.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT ROBACH: Senator
13 Breslin.
14 SENATOR BRESLIN: Thank you,
15 Mr. President.
16 Many of the speakers today have
17 talked about participating in the debate in
18 '95. And of course we took this up some 15
19 months ago, in March of '05.
20 I didn't have that opportunity in
21 1995. I looked upon it, as Senator Duane had
22 said, from afar with a certain point of view.
23 I was a recent high school graduate, I
24 believe. And looking at it, I felt
25 uncomfortable that I wasn't able to
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1 participate in it. Because if I had, I would
2 have been against the death penalty.
3 So I must say, before I make any
4 comments on this, on the death penalty itself,
5 I'm opposed to it.
6 Now, we've heard discussions on
7 both sides, episodic and otherwise, on is it a
8 deterrent. And you look in New York State,
9 you look in New York City, how the murder rate
10 has gone down dramatically at a time when
11 there's been a long-time district attorney
12 there who will not prosecute murder cases,
13 first-degree murder cases.
14 And you look at where you're from,
15 Mr. President, in the Monroe County area,
16 where the murder rate is four times that of
17 the New York City area.
18 And then we look at the racial
19 component of it. And Senator Nozzolio so
20 eloquently looked at the seal behind you,
21 Mr. President. He talked about the two women
22 there. And one of the women happens to have
23 blinders on, which says, in effect, that we
24 will give out penalties in a fair and
25 equitable way.
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1 But unfortunately, in this country,
2 we don't do that. That you're much more
3 likely to face the death penalty if you're a
4 person of color who has killed a white and
5 much more likely to face the death penalty if
6 you're a person of color to begin with. So
7 the fact that our Lady of Justice has blinders
8 on sometimes doesn't work out as well as we
9 would expect.
10 And, you know, there was a study
11 done -- in terms of error in murder cases,
12 there was a study done that 15 months ago
13 Senator Liz Krueger quoted, that 67 percent of
14 the first-degree murder cases have reversible
15 error. Talking about first-degree murder
16 cases. Now in this country there's been over
17 120 people who were sentenced to death who
18 they've found that they were unfairly
19 accused -- because of DNA, because of other
20 evidence, because of the lack of proper
21 representation.
22 And then we set ourselves aside as
23 a country at a time when most civilized
24 countries, if they did have the death penalty,
25 are doing away with it. The European Union
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1 says you can't even be a part of our union if
2 you have the death penalty on your record.
3 So we continue to be like the
4 civilized countries who retain the death
5 penalty -- Iran, for example. So I'd like to
6 set us aside from those kinds of countries, to
7 be a more civilized country, to make sure
8 that -- and as a matter of fact, many of us
9 would think that putting someone in prison for
10 the rest of their lives is much harsher than
11 executing someone. And when we execute
12 someone, in a sense we are acting like the
13 person that we execute.
14 So for all of those reasons, I vote
15 no. Thank you, Madam President.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
17 you, Senator Breslin.
18 Senator Maziarz.
19 SENATOR MAZIARZ: Thank you very
20 much, Madam President.
21 I rise in support of Senator
22 Volker's bill, as I did last year and probably
23 will again next year. And I just want to make
24 a couple of points.
25 First, to harken back to our last
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1 debate on the last bill -- not that we can get
2 back into that, but a point was made by my
3 very good and well-respected colleague Senator
4 Schneiderman that we all know that this is a
5 one-house bill. In fact, it's been referred
6 to in the past as a one-house bill.
7 Actually, I think that
8 eventually -- maybe not this year, maybe not
9 next year, but eventually this bill will pass
10 in the other house. And it's going to pass
11 for probably the wrong reasons.
12 And this is what I consider to be
13 one of our dirty little secrets of Albany.
14 This is something that, quite frankly, I don't
15 know that I ever have say publicly, that I'm
16 embarrassed to be a member of the New York
17 State Legislature. But the one thing that
18 does embarrass me is that you know what will
19 get this bill passed in the other house is the
20 politics of a particular incident. And I'll
21 give you an example.
22 Several years ago, a woman was
23 out -- on Mother's Day, ironically -- her name
24 was Penny Brown, in Senator Young's district.
25 And a young 15-year-old murdered Penny Brown
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1 on Mother's Day, raped and murdered her.
2 And Senator Young, then in the
3 New York State Assembly, produced a bill to
4 punish juveniles who committed crimes like
5 homicide murder in an adult fashion. Much,
6 much more strict and much more severe than the
7 phoney bill that was passed many years ago
8 which just moved those types of crimes from
9 Family Court over to County Court.
10 And, you know, that bill languished
11 in the New York State Assembly, went nowhere.
12 Senator Young, then Assemblyperson Young, held
13 press conferences and tried to get, you know,
14 some activity from the majority over there,
15 and nothing happened.
16 And then there was a very heinous
17 murder in upstate New York in the district of
18 a majority member of the New York State
19 Assembly. Two brothers, 15 and 16 years old,
20 murdered a 16-year-old girl. And out of my
21 respect for all of my colleagues in this room
22 and the staff that works in this room, I won't
23 tell you what they did to that young girl
24 because you would not be able to comprehend it
25 or be able to hold down your lunch if I told
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1 you what these 15- and-16-year-old brothers
2 did to this 16-year-old girl.
3 But, you know, the geography was
4 important because it happened to happen in the
5 district of a majority member on the Assembly
6 side. And that majority member went out and
7 put pressure on the Speaker and joined with
8 Assemblyperson Young at the time, and public
9 pressure.
10 And the mother of that young girl,
11 you know, at a lot of public events said: Why
12 won't the Assembly majority pass this bill?
13 Why is the Assembly majority so prone not to
14 do criminal justice legislation which punishes
15 perpetrators of crime?
16 And guess what? Eventually, you
17 know, Penny's Law was passed by the majority
18 in the other side.
19 So I think, you know, again, it's
20 embarrassing, it's a shame on both of our
21 houses that that's what it's going to take to
22 get this legislation passed into law in
23 New York. But it's going to happen. You
24 know, there's another David Berkowitz out
25 there somewhere. And when it happens,
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1 probably in the downstate area of New York,
2 the other side will then listen because of
3 public pressure and, you know, the news media
4 will change and we'll get it passed.
5 I could not have this debate
6 today -- the opponents of this legislation
7 often quote experts and statisticians and
8 legal scholars about the death penalty and
9 whether it's preventive or not. And, you
10 know, very, very rarely do we hear from the
11 opponents of victims. Very rarely. Now, of
12 course, Senator Schneiderman is going to call
13 his staff and they're going to start getting
14 examples of victims. But very rarely do we
15 hear about victims.
16 And last year when we had this
17 debate I mentioned three victims, and I'm
18 going to mention them again.
19 First and foremost, as always, from
20 the Syracuse area, Senator Valesky's area, is
21 a young woman by the name of Jill Cahill. Not
22 my constituent, not known by me. This is
23 actually the legislation which the Court of
24 Appeals, Judge Kaye, shamefully, shamefully
25 overturned the death penalty litigation in the
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1 state of New York on.
2 Jill Cahill was just a young woman
3 in a lousy marriage. She wasn't, you know,
4 very well educated; had a couple of young
5 kids. Her husband beat her up on a regular
6 basis. The second to the last time that he
7 beat her, he used a baseball bat. And the
8 doctors at Syracuse Hospital estimated that he
9 must have hit her in the head at least four
10 times with a baseball bat, putting her in the
11 hospital. You know, and he was arrested
12 again, for about the eighth or ninth time or
13 something like that.
14 But he didn't kill her. She was
15 actually getting better in the hospital.
16 After spending many weeks in the honest, she
17 was getting better. And he knew that she was
18 getting better. And despite the fact that
19 there was the order of protection, despite the
20 fact that he was out on bail and all those
21 things, he surreptitiously gained entry into
22 the hospital with a wig and a gown, and he
23 went into her hospital room.
24 And the prosecutor proved at trial
25 that what he probably -- what he did attempt
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1 to do was inject her intravenous tube with
2 cyanide poisoning, but that didn't work. She
3 kept breathing. So what he did, out of
4 exasperation and the fact that he was afraid
5 somebody would come in the room, he just
6 poured it down her throat and made her swallow
7 cyanide. Her autopsy photo showed scars
8 outside on her cheeks, down her neck, where
9 the poison, as she was obviously gargling and
10 spitting it up, burned the side of her cheek.
11 And of course they went to trial,
12 and he was found guilty. And then they had
13 the penalty phase of the trial. I think maybe
14 the only time that that's happened in the
15 state of New York. And those jurors painfully
16 went through all of the evidence, decided,
17 despite the fact that several of the jurors
18 were opposed to the death penalty, decided
19 that James Cahill, her husband should receive
20 the death penalty. And of course the court
21 overturned that, and James Cahill is still
22 sitting in prison today.
23 And, you know, the other point I
24 want to make, Madam President, is we talk
25 about life in prison without parole. And that
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1 clearly is, in the eyes of some, a just
2 punishment. You know, let them rot in jail
3 for the rest of their life. The only problem
4 with that is it gives them the opportunity to
5 further victimize their victims.
6 James Cahill, on the anniversary of
7 the day that he murdered his wife, on the
8 anniversary of the day that he murdered his
9 wife, Madam President, he filed an action in
10 Family Court to force his wife's family to
11 bring his two young children to visit him in
12 court.
13 David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, I
14 understand on Mother's Day sends Mother's Day
15 greetings to the mother of one of his victims,
16 Stacy Moskowitz. On Mother's Day, he sends a
17 Mother's Day card to the mother of the girl
18 that he murdered and said some very vile
19 things about during the course of his trial.
20 That's the problem with life in
21 prison without the possibility of parole. It
22 gives them the opportunity to further
23 victimize their victims.
24 I could go on and on, about the
25 Wendy's murders -- you know, just people going
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1 to work at probably, back then, a
2 $7-or-8-an-hour job, marched down in the
3 basement of Wendy's, told to kneel down, and
4 shot in the back of the head execution-style.
5 Their murderer is alive today.
6 And I know that these cases become
7 causes for celebrity. Roger Keith Coleman was
8 an individual, not in New York State, who made
9 the cover of Time Magazine. Time Magazine
10 said: This man might be innocent, but he is
11 going to die. This is a couple of weeks
12 before his scheduled execution.
13 And his execution was carried out,
14 and there was again people -- Jim McCloskey, a
15 former business executive, who gave up
16 everything he had in his life to become part
17 of Centurion Ministries, to prove how wrong
18 they were about the execution of Roger Keith
19 Coleman.
20 And after he was executed, the
21 governor, in order to try to bring closure to
22 the case, because it was very controversial in
23 that state, ordered additional DNA testing
24 using some new DNA methods. And guess what
25 they found out? That Roger Keith Coleman,
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1 despite all of his protestations about not
2 having been anywhere near the scene of this
3 murder, was in fact, without any doubt
4 whatsoever, the murderer and rapist of this
5 young girl.
6 How shocking it is, isn't it, that
7 a serial rapist and murderer, a rapist and a
8 murderer, could also be a liar. Shocking,
9 isn't it?
10 Senator Volker has brought this up
11 before. And, you know, it will probably be
12 coming up years into the future. But
13 eventually this will become law, because
14 eventually there will be changes. I am
15 heartened to hear, I didn't realize that both
16 candidates for governor are supporters of the
17 death penalty in the State of New York.
18 That's a good thing, because that means that
19 this debate will be carried to the streets
20 during the course of this campaign.
21 Madam President, I am very much in
22 support of this bill. And I would ask, in
23 memory of Jill Cahill, that we pass this bill
24 today in the Senate.
25 Thank you, Madam President.
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1 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
2 you, Senator Maziarz.
3 Senator Liz Krueger.
4 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: Thank you,
5 Madam President. On the bill.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: On the
7 bill.
8 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: Well, we've
9 heard a lot of people talking on both death
10 penalty bills today.
11 Murder is heinous. There are evil
12 people. There are sociopaths. There are
13 serial killers. There are, in my opinion,
14 people too damaged to ever be healed. And
15 I'll leave the question of redemption to the
16 theologians.
17 But I heard a lot of my colleagues
18 using the term "civil society" today in their
19 text while appearing fairly bloodthirsty in
20 their desire to punish those who have
21 murdered. And I would argue that the
22 definition of assuring a civil society is to
23 make sure that we don't bring ourselves down
24 to the same level as the people we are
25 speaking of today, the murderers.
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1 One Senator mentioned that he came
2 here 16 years earlier, as an Assembly member,
3 to deal with this bill. And he said, what's
4 changed in 16 years? And I would argue one
5 thing that has changed is we have enormous
6 data, 16 years later, as to why we should not
7 have a death penalty in the United States.
8 And I would argue that in addition
9 to the points that were made earlier by many
10 of my colleagues -- that we don't have a
11 perfect judicial system, that we have racial
12 bias in our judicial system, that we have
13 proof that the death penalty is not a
14 deterrent to evil people who in fact sometimes
15 do evil things -- what we know 16 years later
16 is that we have an imperfect system and we
17 sometimes put people in prison under death
18 penalty laws throughout this country who are
19 later found not to be guilty of their crimes.
20 And that if we are a society who is
21 prepared to put people to death, and in some
22 cases innocent people to death, then we are a
23 society that would flunk the test of civility.
24 And because not so much data has
25 been offered up in the arguments today, I
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1 would like to just, for the record, list some
2 information.
3 Since 1973, at least 119 people
4 have been released from death row across this
5 country after evidence of their innocence was
6 uncovered. This represents approximately one
7 wrongful conviction for every eight
8 executions. I repeat, one wrongful conviction
9 for every eight executions. And these people
10 have spent an average of eight years on death
11 row before the truth finally came out, and
12 many of them spent far longer awaiting
13 execution for the crime they did not commit.
14 And in virtually all of these
15 cases, justice was not finally served because
16 the system worked but because of extraordinary
17 efforts by people outside the criminal justice
18 system who looked into these cases and fought
19 to get to the truth.
20 New York's own history is strewn
21 with stories of innocent people convicted of
22 murders they did not commit. Many of them
23 testified at hearings that the Assembly held a
24 year ago on this topic.
25 Some of these stories include the
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1 one of Bobby McLaughlin, who was wrongfully
2 sentenced to life in prison for a 1979
3 Brooklyn murder. The state's primary witness
4 only picked McLaughlin out of a police lineup
5 after the police had shown him a picture of
6 McLaughlin, who had been previously arrested.
7 Leading comments by the police like these are
8 common and often contribute to mistaken
9 eyewitness ID. Even worse, though the fact
10 was the police provided the picture to
11 witnesses, it was of the wrong Bobby
12 McLaughlin -- a man with the same name, but no
13 relationship.
14 Despite this major and clear error,
15 it took six years and the extraordinary effort
16 of many to prove his innocence. Had we had a
17 death penalty available in 1980, he might have
18 been executed.
19 According to a 2002 Newsday
20 investigation, there were 13 New Yorkers
21 released after serving time for murders they
22 did not commit just in the four-year period
23 1998 to 2002 alone.
24 I don't know what anyone else's
25 definition of a civil society is, but for me a
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1 society that says if you put someone else to
2 death, we will choose to put you to death,
3 despite the fact that we cannot possibly have
4 a perfect judicial system and process that
5 will guarantee that we are always right, is
6 not a society that is civil. Senator Breslin
7 mentioned many European countries don't even
8 allow consideration of the death penalty.
9 It doesn't bring people back. It
10 doesn't deter future crimes. We do have an
11 alternative option. It is a good one. It is
12 life in prison without parole. We can protect
13 our citizens from the evil people amongst us
14 by ensuring that evil people go to jail for
15 the rest of their lives. We should not --
16 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
17 you.
18 Senator Nozzolio, why do you rise?
19 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Madam
20 President, I ask the speaker to yield.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
22 you.
23 Senator Krueger, do you yield?
24 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: I have one
25 more sentence. If you don't mind, Senator,
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1 let me finish my last sentence and then I'll
2 be happy to yield.
3 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Madam
4 President, the speaker asks, continually,
5 others to yield.
6 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: I'm just
7 going to finish my sentence, Madam
8 President --
9 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: I'm asking the
10 speaker to yield.
11 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: I'm going
12 to continue my final statement, and then I'll
13 be happy to yield. Thank you.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Senator
15 Nozzolio, Senator Krueger does not yield.
16 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: Thank you,
17 Madam President.
18 Even with DNA research, we know
19 that we have made mistakes in death penalty
20 cases. Other states have proposed evaluations
21 of their death penalty laws before they move
22 forward with the death penalty. This bill
23 does not meet any of the standards being
24 proposed in other states. And so for these
25 reasons, I argue we should not reinstate a
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1 death penalty in New York. Thank you very
2 much.
3 And now I would be happy to yield
4 to Senator Nozzolio.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
6 you.
7 Senator Nozzolio, do you wish to --
8 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Madam
9 President, it's extremely discourteous when a
10 member asks a member to yield and that member
11 refuses. I've stood in this chamber countless
12 times and have yielded to Senator Krueger
13 immediately upon the request.
14 I think that that certainly is
15 something that is discourteous, and I state
16 that in my question to Senator Krueger, just
17 reminding the countless times that I've
18 complied with your request to yield. The one
19 time I've ever requested you to yield, you've
20 asked to finish a sentence. Frankly, I think
21 that's discourteous and would hope that in the
22 future you treat your colleague with more
23 courtesies.
24 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Point of
25 order.
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1 The Senator requested to be able to
2 ask a question. Senator Krueger yielded, as
3 often takes place in this house on both sides
4 of the aisle, people ask to be able to finish
5 their statements and then they'll be glad to
6 yield. That's all she did. It is extremely
7 common.
8 If the Senator has a question, I'd
9 appreciate it if he'd ask it rather than
10 accusing people of discourtesy who are trying
11 to be courteous.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
13 you.
14 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Thank you.
15 Madam President, will Senator Krueger yield?
16 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
17 you.
18 Senator Krueger, do you yield?
19 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: Yes, Madam
20 President, I already agreed to yield.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
22 you. The Senator yields.
23 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Madam
24 President, my question to Senator Krueger is,
25 how does she intend to protect the correction
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1 officers in our state, those correctional
2 personnel in our state, well over 30,000
3 individuals who labor, laying their lives on
4 the line each and every day, walking in most
5 cases the toughest beat in America? How does
6 she intend to protect them from those who have
7 been convicted of murder, have nothing left to
8 lose, and have already exhibited tremendously
9 violent behavior?
10 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Senator
11 Krueger.
12 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: Thank you,
13 Madam President.
14 You know, it's interesting, I did
15 not read for the record the pages and pages of
16 organizations who actually argue against the
17 death penalty, and it includes quite a few in
18 law enforcement.
19 I actually have a document here
20 signed off by law enforcement organizations
21 arguing that the death penalty will not make
22 them safer in their jobs but, rather, that
23 they need better staffing ratios to do the
24 jobs they do, they need better protective
25 equipment, they need to ensure that criminals
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1 don't have weapons, guns and other weapons,
2 available to themselves.
3 So I would respectfully argue that
4 in fact if we were to talk to the law
5 enforcement experts in this state, we would
6 hear from them that they have a very long list
7 of issues that they hope we will accomplish
8 legislatively and budgetarily that would make
9 them more safe in their jobs.
10 But that there is not, again, a
11 strong argument that the death penalty would
12 be a deterrent even for people in a prison
13 situation from the perspective of the safety
14 of our officers.
15 Thank you, Madam President.
16 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Madam
17 President, will Senator Krueger continue to
18 yield?
19 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
20 you.
21 Senator Krueger, do you continue to
22 yield?
23 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: Yes, I do,
24 Madam President.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
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1 Senator yields.
2 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Respectfully,
3 Madam President, I don't believe Senator
4 Krueger has answered my question. Other than
5 to say this should be discarded to other law
6 enforcement officials to consider.
7 That each member of this conference
8 who has spoken out in favor of this bill or
9 the last bill have talked of law enforcement
10 officers who in fact indicate that this is
11 exactly the type of protection they desire.
12 We're not asking -- we don't have to read
13 additional articles, we don't have to do
14 additional surveys or conduct additional polls
15 or even hearings. Law enforcement officers
16 are telling us this is something they want for
17 the protection of particularly those COs.
18 I'm saying would Senator Krueger --
19 SENATOR CONNOR: Point of order,
20 Madam President. I'm waiting for the
21 question. I've waited for two minutes of
22 dialogue here. It's a debate, it's not a
23 question.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: I
25 believe Senator Nozzolio has asked a question.
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1 He's explaining further his question.
2 Continue.
3 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Thank you,
4 Madam President.
5 What particular sanctions does
6 Senator Krueger have in place to suggest the
7 protection of our correctional personnel who
8 work behind bars governing the most violent of
9 criminals in our state?
10 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
11 you.
12 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: Thank you,
13 Madam President.
14 I believe now that I understand the
15 question was specific to correctional officers
16 in our prison system, not police officers per
17 se out on the street.
18 Again, for the record, there are
19 quite a few police organizations who have come
20 out formally against the death penalty.
21 And I suppose the answer to the
22 question for correctional officers is in fact
23 is there no other option available to them to
24 protect them in the prisons. I have to
25 believe that's not the case. I have to
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1 believe we have very -- in most circumstances,
2 good mechanisms in place. Because I'm not
3 aware of that many situations, with thousands
4 and thousands of people in our prison system,
5 where we have death penalty type of cases
6 arising out of people who are already in
7 prison.
8 We certainly have the ability to
9 do, I believe in New York State, and it's
10 controversial in its own right, almost 24/7
11 individual lockup where you have no access
12 either to the general prison population or to
13 correction officers.
14 Again, my argument, Madam
15 President, is that in a civil society the
16 right answer is not the death penalty. And
17 certainly from a statistical research
18 analysis, as a deterrent for further crime the
19 death penalty has also proved not to be an
20 effective deterrent.
21 I suppose an added irony I might
22 add in this situation is these are people who
23 are already in prison but, I gather we assume,
24 not on death row. If you had the death
25 penalty specifically -- if I'm to understand
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1 your question correctly, Senator -- if you
2 were to have a death penalty unique only to
3 those already in lockup in our prison system,
4 you would then move them from being in prison
5 to being on death row in prison, perhaps again
6 for extended numbers of years.
7 So it's not obvious to me how that
8 would change the daily scenario for correction
9 officers, because again it would be someone
10 still in the prison system under an additional
11 set of charges, perhaps, or even found guilty
12 of additional crimes, but still they are in
13 the prison system, now technically on death
14 row.
15 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Madam
16 President.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Senator
18 Nozzolio.
19 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Will Senator
20 Krueger continue to yield?
21 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Senator
22 Krueger, do you continue to yield?
23 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: Yes, I do,
24 Madam President.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
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1 Senator yields.
2 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Madam
3 President, my question is very simple. What
4 is Senator Krueger's intention if a convicted
5 murderer, life without parole, sentenced to
6 life without parole, commits another murder
7 while they're in prison, what is Senator
8 Krueger's suggestion for appropriate sanctions
9 and punishment for that convicted murderer?
10 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: Thank you,
11 Madam President.
12 I believe I did -- I do understand
13 the question. I'm not sure it's different
14 than the one I just answered.
15 I think that the answer is that in
16 reality, as I stated several times, there are
17 some truly evil people in our midst that have
18 no ability for redemption. And the question
19 is what can you to control to make sure that
20 they are not in a position to murder again.
21 Which I suppose in the situation you are
22 describing, or the hypothetical you are
23 describing, is a much more intense and careful
24 lockup procedure within the prison.
25 Again, I don't believe that your
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1 question leads me to reevaluate my argument of
2 why we should not have a death penalty in our
3 society. But again, I think you are speaking
4 of a very subspecific analysis.
5 Thank you, Madam President.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
7 you.
8 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Thank you,
9 Madam President.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Senator
11 Klein.
12 SENATOR KLEIN: On the bill,
13 Madam President.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
15 you. Senator Klein, on the bill.
16 SENATOR KLEIN: Back in 1995 when
17 we passed our original death penalty statute,
18 I voted for it then and spoke on the floor in
19 the State Assembly.
20 Over 10 years later, I still remain
21 in favor of the death penalty. I don't think
22 anything has really changed other than the
23 fact that we're lucky enough that we've seen a
24 tremendous decrease in crime in New York
25 State.
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1 And I think it's incumbent upon us
2 to continue what we did 12 years ago. It was
3 passed by the Legislature. I still have some
4 doubts whether or not the bill that we passed
5 should have been found unconstitutional by the
6 Court of Appeals.
7 But I really don't want to go on
8 and talk in favor of the death penalty, even
9 though I still remain committed, I still
10 believe that it is a deterrent to crime. As a
11 matter of fact -- I had the opportunity
12 earlier to speak to Senator Volker -- the
13 seminal study in this area done by Isaac
14 Ehrlich, which is entitled "The Deterrent
15 Effect of Capital Punishment: A Question of
16 Life and Death," still remains something that
17 I believe in.
18 According to Ehrlich's study, for
19 every dangerous individual who commits such a
20 heinous act that that person is executed,
21 there's a three-to-one margin; for every one
22 person, three people's lives are saved,
23 according to Mr. Ehrlich.
24 What's interesting about
25 Dr. Ehrlich, he's someone who himself is not
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1 in favor of the death penalty, yet he put
2 together this very, very important study which
3 does show that there is a deterrent effect of
4 the death penalty.
5 Even if there wasn't that type of
6 evidence, I still believe that the death
7 penalty fits into our basic common-law
8 principles, our laws under our United States
9 Constitution, because we are a society that's
10 based on proportional justice. And I
11 certainly believe that in this case, the death
12 penalty cries out for certain types of
13 criminals, people who commit very heinous
14 crimes.
15 I think it's also worth bringing up
16 that the death penalty statute which was
17 passed, as I said earlier, in 1995, really, I
18 think, provided a tremendous number of
19 safeguards to make sure that someone wasn't
20 wrongly executed. There's two juries. A
21 fresh jury actually weighs whether or not that
22 individual should get life in prison without
23 parole or the death penalty. There's adequate
24 representation through a separate office.
25 So I really believe that it was a
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1 law that, I think, probably really passed
2 constitutional muster more than any other
3 death penalty statute across the state.
4 What I think is worth mentioning
5 today -- and a lot of my colleagues I think
6 spoke on this in other ways -- I think what
7 we're doing today is very important and I
8 think it makes for good government. And what
9 we're doing is we're debating a very, very
10 important piece of legislation, a piece of
11 legislation that people feel very strongly one
12 way or the other.
13 I wish I can say the same about my
14 former house in the Assembly, which
15 unfortunately doesn't think it's important
16 enough to put a bill like this on the floor
17 for debate. I'm not going to say that it's
18 just the Assembly, because I know my colleague
19 Tom Duane -- he's not here. But I think what
20 he's been doing each and every day is just as
21 important. He's raising an issue known as
22 Timothy's Law, which is an issue that
23 unfortunately here hasn't seen the light of
24 day.
25 I think what's happening here is
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1 our dysfunctioning government in Albany -- and
2 I think the Senate and the Assembly both
3 deserve some blame -- prevents us from doing
4 some very important legislation. Timothy's
5 Law. Here we are again without a death
6 penalty in New York State, which I think is
7 important and many feel is important. And
8 even those who don't feel it's important
9 should have that opportunity to vote no.
10 The other issue that I've talked
11 about on this floor many times this year is
12 eliminating our five-year statutory limitation
13 on rape. We did pass a law here -- or a bill,
14 I should say, in the State Senate. The
15 Assembly passed something different. I think
16 it's incumbent upon us now to work something
17 out and not leave this legislative session
18 without eliminating the five-year statutory
19 limitation.
20 Civil confinement. Again, we
21 passed a bill, the Assembly passed a bill.
22 Once again, we're going to leave here without
23 taking care of some very, very important
24 matters.
25 So I think today is a good thing.
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1 And I think we should have much more debate,
2 and I think both houses should follow that
3 lead, where all bills of importance,
4 especially of something as important as the
5 death penalty, should be debated and should be
6 voted on by both houses of the Legislature.
7 I vote yes, Madam President.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
9 you, Senator Klein.
10 Senator Ada Smith.
11 SENATOR ADA SMITH: Thank you,
12 Madam President.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
14 you. Senator Smith, on the bill.
15 SENATOR ADA SMITH: I rise to
16 speak in opposition to the restoration of the
17 death penalty in the State of New York.
18 While I have concerns about the
19 unfair administration of the death penalty --
20 the racial and geographic disparities in its
21 imposition, among others -- today I rise to
22 discuss the application of capital punishment
23 upon the mentally ill. In 2002 the U.S.
24 Supreme Court Issued a landmark ruling ending
25 the execution of those with mental
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1 retardation. In Atkins v. Virginia, the court
2 held that it is a violation of the Eighth
3 Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual
4 punishment to execute death row inmates with
5 mental retardation. That decision reflects
6 the national consensus regarding this issue.
7 As we debate restoring the death
8 penalty in our own state, I ask you to keep in
9 mind that there is nothing in New York's death
10 penalty statute that would bar the execution
11 of someone who is seriously mentally ill.
12 New York juries have rendered guilty verdicts
13 against obviously mentally ill defendants,
14 often resulting in long prison sentences
15 instead of treatment in a secure mental health
16 facility.
17 The adversarial nature of the legal
18 system assumes -- indeed, it requires --
19 rational self-interest on the defendant's
20 part, an assumption that may go out of the
21 window when the defendant is mentally ill.
22 Although people with severe mental illness may
23 have less culpability for behavior rooted in
24 uncontrollable delusions, they are far more
25 likely to give false confessions, to be unable
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1 to cooperate with defense attorneys, and to
2 mistake their self-interest when making
3 crucial decisions, both before and during
4 trial.
5 Yet there are no special provisions
6 in New York's death penalty law designed to
7 protect the mentally ill. In other death
8 penalty states, people with severe mental
9 illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar
10 disorder are regularly put to death under laws
11 very similar to the law proposed in New York
12 State.
13 There are many reasons to oppose
14 the death penalty, but laws that allow the
15 execution of the mentally ill -- this bill
16 will, if restored today -- these laws are just
17 simply cruel. If we do plan to restore the
18 death penalty in this state, I urge my
19 colleagues to consider enacting a blanket
20 prohibition on the execution of mentally ill.
21 We cannot forget that when we talk
22 of death-eligible crimes, we are talking about
23 very serious crimes. Nor can we overlook the
24 suffering of the victim and his or her family.
25 The execution of a seriously
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1 mentally ill individual runs contrary to the
2 spirit of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S.
3 Constitution with its prohibition against
4 cruel and unusual punishment, to international
5 law, and to all evolving standards of decency.
6 But I ask you to consider one final
7 thought as you prepare to cast your vote on
8 this important issue. What purpose does
9 executing a sick person have?
10 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
11 you, Senator Smith.
12 Senator Connor.
13 SENATOR CONNOR: Thank you, Madam
14 President.
15 I rise in opposition to this bill
16 and will cast my vote in opposition to it.
17 Did a little calculation; I am the
18 member in this body who has spoken against and
19 voted against the death penalty more than any
20 other, with one exception, and that is our
21 esteemed colleague Senator Marchi.
22 You know, the history of the death
23 penalty in New York, it kind of -- I listened
24 to some members who haven't been in the
25 Legislature quite so long as others of us, and
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1 they talk about the death penalty as if it all
2 started in 1995.
3 The fact is this Legislature
4 repealed the death penalty in 1965, and the
5 Legislature I believe in '73 or '74 put it
6 back on the books. So there's been a death
7 penalty on the law books -- not this bill, not
8 this law -- since 1974, but that law was
9 declared unconstitutional.
10 So whatever the technical points
11 that my good colleague Senator Balboni was
12 making, I don't get them, frankly. All those
13 death penalty debates in the '70s and '80s
14 until 1995 were about a death penalty bill
15 when there was already one on the books but it
16 was unenforceable. Now we have one on the
17 books that's also unenforceable. It's
18 constitutionally infirm and unenforceable.
19 It was adopted in 1995. At the
20 time, I was the only legislative leader who
21 voted against it. Yet the Governor, in doing
22 that bill, in drafting it, had all four
23 legislative leaders participating with their
24 counsels. Everyone from -- all the counsels,
25 from the Governor's counsel to mine to the
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1 Speaker's, were actually personally opposed to
2 the death penalty, but professionally they
3 drafted the best bill they could -- with one
4 exception, this provision that was found to be
5 unconstitutional.
6 So this debate is about the death
7 penalty. If you think New York ought to have
8 a death penalty, you're for this bill. And if
9 you think New York shouldn't have a death
10 penalty, you're against this bill. And
11 there's no way to parse it and say, oh, it's
12 only a little technical amendment.
13 Now, various -- I've heard about
14 every argument for or against the death
15 penalty over the years that you can imagine,
16 that could be imagined, heard every statistic
17 thrown out from both sides that the absolute
18 ingenuity, creativity and never-ending search
19 for research can impose on academia. I've
20 seen studies that prove it is a deterrent, it
21 isn't a deterrent, it will save two-for-one in
22 lives or it will cost more lives because there
23 will be more murders after a death penalty.
24 I don't know that any of that is
25 relevant. What is relevant is, Madam
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1 President, we have a judicial system that's
2 human, that's administered by humans. It's
3 far from perfect. It may be the best system
4 on earth -- probably is -- but it is far from
5 infallible.
6 We also have a system that's based
7 on everyone's right to counsel. But, you
8 know, there are counsels and then there are
9 counsel. There are the appointed counsel that
10 get whatever they get now -- I don't know,
11 $80, $90 an hour, maybe a hundred and some
12 dollars in a capital case -- and then there
13 are the kind that wealthy people can afford
14 that get $800, $900 an hour. There is a
15 difference, I suspect. I know there is a
16 difference, I should say, and the difference
17 isn't just in the billing rates.
18 As I said once in a death penalty
19 debate, show me the millionaires, show me the
20 millionaires that have ever gone to the chair.
21 Now, I know there aren't that many
22 millionaires that committed murder, but there
23 have been some. And you know what? They
24 don't get the death penalty.
25 The people who get the death
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1 penalty are the bottom end of the rung. It
2 has always been true. I grew up in a
3 household -- thankfully, my grandfather
4 actually lived to 105 and really only passed
5 away about 10 years ago. He was born in 1890.
6 He was an Irish-American, his parents were
7 immigrants. He was the first one born here in
8 America, a year after his parents emigrated.
9 He was rather conservative about a
10 lot of things, and he wasn't so conservative
11 about other things. He all of his life was
12 against the death penalty. I asked him once
13 when I was a boy why, and he said: "Well,
14 when I was a kid, our people got the death
15 penalty. Before my family came here, they got
16 it for political reasons in Ireland, and after
17 they came here, well, I grew up in a tough
18 neighborhood, we were all poor kids, and I
19 knew a lot of guys who got in a lot of
20 trouble. And when they got in trouble, the
21 book was thrown at them. And if they happened
22 to kill someone, they got the death penalty."
23 Other people didn't. Leopold and
24 Loeb didn't go to the chair for their
25 calculated, heinous, brutal murder. They were
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1 wealthy.
2 And not to refer to studies, I'd
3 rather refer to literature. Someone once
4 wrote an article, they got to review --
5 there's a logbook in the death house in
6 New York State. They kept a log of who's
7 executed. And believe me, in the late 19th
8 century and early 20th century, a lot of
9 people got executed.
10 In fact, when I was a kid -- I grew
11 up in New Jersey -- I remember us saying,
12 "Wow, New York, they fry a lot of people."
13 New York was pretty liberal about imposing and
14 inflicting the death penalty, not just for
15 murder -- armed robbery, a lot of other crime.
16 And New York used it.
17 But if you -- this survey of the
18 logbook in the death house has this amazing,
19 amazing clusters of ethnicity in the names.
20 1870s and 1880s and in the 1890s, you know, a
21 lot of names that began with "O" and
22 apostrophe -- you know, O'Malley, O'Brien,
23 Murphy, whatever.
24 Then you got to the early parts
25 of -- or the turn of that century, 19th to
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1 20th, you started seeing a lot of vowels at
2 the end of names, a lot of Italian-Americans.
3 A lot of Jewish names.
4 And then as you progressed in that
5 century, if you can call it progress -- I
6 mean, I say "progress" in the sense that the
7 years went by -- you saw a lot of names that
8 sounded like Smith, Brown, first names like
9 Willy, whatever. Clearly it started to be --
10 we were executing more and more
11 African-Americans.
12 And then, you know, when you get
13 into the '40s and '50s, you started seeing a
14 lot of Latino names.
15 It is an accident that there were
16 these clusters? No. Who was on the bottom of
17 the heap, who were the poor people struggling,
18 who were the people in poverty? And, yes,
19 most likely to commit crimes, but not the only
20 people who were committing crimes. Certainly
21 not the only people committing murders. They
22 were just the ones who were getting the chair,
23 because they were the ones who couldn't afford
24 the $800 -- in those days, $100-an-hour
25 lawyers. They couldn't afford the fancy
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1 defenses and the appeals and whatever.
2 Society was more ready to inflict the penalty
3 on them just because they were at the bottom
4 of the heap.
5 That's a fact, Madam President.
6 The death penalty has always had an inherent
7 bias in it against the poor. And our criminal
8 justice system has that bias. It's the nature
9 of it. If you can't afford the best lawyers,
10 you're going to pay the strongest penalties.
11 You're not going to get the breaks the system
12 seems to afford those who can afford a lawyer.
13 So the death penalty has those
14 problems. Now, you know, now we're in the age
15 of DNA. And some of my colleagues will say
16 these DNA studies have shown people on death
17 row were innocent. And Senator Volker will
18 say, Well, no, no, no, not all of them were
19 innocent. You know? They weren't innocent,
20 they did something or whatever.
21 Madam President, maybe things have
22 changed since I went to law school. Since
23 when is it about whether you're guilty or
24 innocent? Madam President, I know Senator
25 Volker knows this. The issue is whether
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1 you're guilty or not guilty. And you're
2 guilty if you're proven guilty beyond a
3 reasonable doubt.
4 And what these DNA instances -- and
5 there are dozens of them -- have proved, that
6 there were people on death row who were not
7 guilty. Doesn't mean they're innocent,
8 doesn't mean they're pure as the driven snow,
9 it just meant they were not convicted beyond a
10 reasonable doubt of why they were on death
11 row.
12 And, Madam President, I hope in all
13 this debate we go back to that fundamental.
14 You have to be guilty. And the fear -- yes,
15 the fear is that someone who is innocent will
16 be executed. But the greater fear is that
17 someone will be executed who was actually not
18 guilty; i.e., his or her guilt was not proven
19 beyond a reasonable doubt, it was based on
20 flawed evidence or other evidence that wasn't
21 available, such as DNA evidence, which proves
22 that they were not guilty as convicted.
23 So that fallibility in the system
24 is very, very disturbing. But let's talk
25 about politics here. What political problem
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1 are we addressing? Why did the Legislature
2 repeal the death penalty in the mid-'60s,
3 reimpose it in the mid-'70s, and, when it was
4 thrown out, not get the political will and
5 force together to reenact it until 1995?
6 People were reacting to crime rates.
7 Now, proponents of the death
8 penalty will say, Aha, crime has gone down,
9 murders have gone down since we enacted the
10 death penalty in 1995. But no one's been
11 executed. No one's come close to being
12 executed. I fail to see the great deterrent
13 value in that.
14 Murders are down. That's
15 wonderful. So is auto theft. So is almost
16 every category of crime, except there may be
17 some evidence now that rape has increased, but
18 you always have the frequency of reporting of
19 that have crime, a different problem, that
20 makes those statistics open to question.
21 But all crime is down. Why?
22 Better policing. Yes, strong sentences that
23 we started passing. We started passing longer
24 and longer sentences in this Legislature when
25 Mel Miller was the Speaker, when studies came
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1 out that showed recidivism was occurring.
2 Look, most crime is committed by
3 young males; that's the statistic. And that
4 recidivism went down greatly after like age
5 40. Criminals just age out. They can -- if
6 they get out after age 40, they don't commit a
7 crime again. They get out at age 28, they
8 tend to be back in jail.
9 Those longer sentences had the
10 effect of keeping criminals -- armed robbers,
11 et cetera -- in jail longer until they aged
12 out of that population most likely to commit
13 crimes.
14 We did that. We did that back in
15 the mid-'80s. We passed those sentences, and
16 they have had an effect of taking repeat
17 offenders out of the population while they are
18 in that demographic that commits crime.
19 The other thing is if you look at
20 population trends, the census, the census from
21 1980 and 1990 proves something. There was a
22 huge dip in the population, in the percentage
23 of the population that consisted of young
24 males. Back in the early '80s, it was of
25 young boys. But -- so projecting, there were
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1 going to be less 16-to-35-year-old males in
2 the population for the last 15 years.
3 And then there was better policing,
4 more sophisticated policing that contributed
5 tremendously to that drop in crime.
6 Does anybody think that contract
7 killings are down because there was a death
8 penalty on the books? Yet that's the most
9 calculated, heinous, brutal, cold-blooded kind
10 of killing there is. Those people don't think
11 they'll get caught. The real premeditated
12 murderers, they don't believe they're going to
13 get caught. How could you premeditate a
14 murder if you ever thought you'd get caught?
15 You think they want to spend life in prison
16 any more than they want to get executed? I
17 don't think so. So I really have always
18 seriously doubted the deterrence.
19 Concepts of justice, retribution,
20 that's one argument that grabs me sometimes.
21 I can't say that it's fundamentally unfair to
22 take the life of someone who took a life in a
23 calculated, deliberate way.
24 But I can say that for the state to
25 do that, to take that very life in a
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1 calculated, deliberate way, just as that
2 person did to the victim, is unworthy of a
3 civilized society. It demeans our civility.
4 It demeans our whole value for life.
5 And there are alternatives. You
6 know, this question that Senator Nozzolio
7 asked Senator Krueger, how are you going to
8 protect correction officers?
9 Well, how do we protect correction
10 officers on death row when they have a
11 population there of people with nothing to
12 lose, nothing to lose if they kill a
13 correction officer? They're not looking for
14 life without parole. They're in there to be
15 put to death. What have they got to lose?
16 Yet we manage, with technology and modern
17 prison methods, to protect those correction
18 officers. You do the same thing for the
19 life-without-parolees. It's very simple.
20 The bottom line, Madam President,
21 is I'm against the death penalty. I think we
22 can do better. And I think the fact that it's
23 now here just reflects a preoccupation with --
24 the death penalty in New York is yesterday's
25 issue. It's George Pataki's 1994 issue in
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1 response to a 1985 problem using an 1885
2 penalty. Why in 2006 we are making this an
3 issue is beyond me.
4 Madam President, I'm against it.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
6 you, Senator Connor.
7 Senator Diaz.
8 SENATOR DIAZ: Thank you, Madam
9 President. It has been said by many -- or
10 some of the speakers that this debate today is
11 a waste of time and that we are only killing
12 time. But this is a good debate, and this
13 debate is giving an opportunity to see things.
14 Like, for example, there are people
15 that passionately and deeply, emotionally
16 defend the death penalty. And they fight and
17 they push and they will put in, any which way,
18 the death penalty. They don't care about
19 people dying. Those same people passionately
20 emotionally defend the unborn babies. So they
21 are pushing for a death penalty to take away
22 life, and they fight against taking the life
23 of an unborn baby.
24 On the other side, there are people
25 that fight emotionally against the death
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1 penalty because thou shalt not kill. And they
2 don't want the death penalty because it's
3 immoral, because whatever reason. But those
4 same people fight emotionally to kill unborn
5 babies. Even they fight to kill babies in
6 something called late-term abortion. Meaning
7 that you take the baby out half, you could
8 examine the baby, and if you don't like the
9 baby you kill it.
10 So there we are. People fighting
11 against the penalty because thou shalt not
12 kill and it is immoral, but they are fighting
13 to kill unborn babies even in the late-term
14 abortion.
15 And there are those again that
16 would like to protect those babies and will
17 fight tooth and nail to protect the unborn
18 babies because thou shall shalt not kill; they
19 will fight to kill human beings with the death
20 penalty.
21 And there are others, there's a
22 third kind. The third kind, those that fight
23 to kill babies and fight for the death
24 penalty.
25 And the fourth kind is like --
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1 those like me. That is the fourth kind, those
2 like me, that deeply respect life in all
3 shapes and forms and don't believe that one
4 life is worth more than the other. Those who,
5 like me, believe that life is precious and
6 sacred, no matter unborn babies, late-term
7 abortion, half born, or a criminal.
8 So, ladies and gentlemen, my
9 question to myself, to my inner me: How can
10 you fight against the death penalty and then
11 fight to kill unborn babies by the thousands
12 and thousands and thousands? And how can you
13 fight to defend the unborn babies because thou
14 shalt not kill, but you want the death
15 penalty?
16 Go figure. I don't know. Either
17 you -- either death is immoral or it is not.
18 Either you kill babies and you kill people or
19 you don't kill anybody. Either all life are
20 precious and sacred or not. But don't come
21 here trying to be the last Coke in the desert
22 defending and opposing the death penalty and
23 then go out there and kill all the babies.
24 Kill all the babies, all the babies, 9 months
25 old, even when they come out halfway,
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1 late-term abortion -- kill them, it's not
2 life. Yes, they are life too.
3 And don't come here fighting for to
4 defend the babies and push the death penalty,
5 or pushing the death penalty and defending the
6 babies. It doesn't make sense. It does not
7 make sense. Either you are the third
8 category, the one that kills babies and wants
9 the death penalty, or the fourth category,
10 like me, kill no one. Life is sacred. Life,
11 everybody is the same -- bodegueros, police
12 officers, children, battered women, senior
13 citizens, teachers, anybody. All life are
14 equal. They are equal. They're all worth the
15 same. Thou shalt not kill. That means no
16 killing.
17 Thank you, Madam President.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
19 you, Senator Diaz.
20 Are there any other Senators
21 wishing to be heard?
22 The debate is closed.
23 The Secretary will ring the bell.
24 Senator Skelos.
25 SENATOR SKELOS: Madam President,
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1 just to inform the members.
2 We haven't read the last section
3 yet on this bill, but once we complete the
4 roll call, Senator Young's bill will be
5 brought up. I believe Senator Duane wanted to
6 cast a negative vote. So if you could stay in
7 the chamber, that will happen quickly.
8 Then there's going to be a Rules
9 meeting in which one bill will be brought up
10 for a vote when we come out of Rules.
11 So thank you. If we could read the
12 last section.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
14 you.
15 Read the last section.
16 THE SECRETARY: Section 5. This
17 act shall take effect immediately.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Call
19 the roll.
20 (The Secretary called the roll.)
21 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Senator
22 Volker, to explain your vote.
23 SENATOR VOLKER: Thank you, Madam
24 President. Because of the time here, I
25 decided not to sum up. Let me just make a
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1 couple of comments.
2 First of all, as far as we know, no
3 seriously mentally ill person has ever been
4 executed in this state. There's all kinds of
5 protections in this bill. The anti-death
6 penalty people desperately wanted us to put a
7 provision in that said no mentally ill people
8 could be executed. That would probably finish
9 the whole system, because defense attorneys
10 would pile on and say, well, anybody that
11 kills is mentally ill.
12 As far as race is concerned, we've
13 done studies of New York's system and pretty
14 well everyone has said that the New York
15 system has been extremely good on the issue of
16 race. No person has ever been executed in
17 this state where he or she has ever been found
18 by any definitive nature to be not guilty.
19 And I mean to not have committed the crime.
20 Third, let me tell you, Senator
21 Connor, being Irish myself, that my
22 grandfather came over late in the 1800s. He
23 would tell you why so many Irishmen were
24 executed. They were very tough people. And
25 they were fighting each other. And I don't
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1 know if you've ever seen "The Gangs of
2 New York," but the reason there were
3 executions -- and some of them were cops, by
4 the way. There were some really bad Irish
5 cops at that time.
6 The next group was the Italians.
7 And that's true. You know, they weren't just
8 poor, a lot of them were wealthy, by the way,
9 and did very well.
10 And by the way, Julius and Ethel
11 Rosenberg. You talk about millionaires? They
12 were executed. I just want you to remember
13 that.
14 You know, most of the anti-death
15 penalty people will tell you we have more
16 protections in this bill than any bill in the
17 country. Massachusetts, that doesn't have a
18 death penalty statute, claims they've got a
19 lot of protections. Well, they'd better look
20 at this bill if they're ever going to restore
21 it. But they don't have the guts to do it.
22 They'll never restore it in Massachusetts as
23 long as the Kennedys are around.
24 I vote aye.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
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1 you.
2 Senator Connor, to explain his
3 vote.
4 SENATOR CONNOR: Thank you.
5 Thank you, Madam President. Thank you.
6 Gee. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,
7 they weren't rich. They lived in my -- what's
8 now my district, Knickerbocker Village, which
9 was one of the first subsidized housings in
10 New York State. I mean, yes, they were
11 Jewish, but they weren't rich. And the fact
12 is, someone very close to me actually has --
13 is a cousin of Ethel Rosenberg. Was.
14 So, I mean, they weren't
15 millionaires who were executed. And, I mean,
16 who wants to get into that case? That was the
17 ultimate political case of the last century.
18 The fact of the matter is that it
19 is the poor people. All those people were
20 tough. Yes, they were tough. They were tough
21 immigrants. The streets are tough. The
22 street of the ghettos are always tough. It's
23 dog eat dog, and a lot of crime is committed.
24 But the people who dwell in those ghettos,
25 whenever they were and whoever inhabited them
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1 at the time, yes, they were tough, but they
2 were poor. That's why they were there. And
3 they disproportionately paid the ultimate
4 penalty for their heinous crimes because they
5 were poor.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
7 you. Senator Connor will be recorded in the
8 negative.
9 Senator Schneiderman, to explain
10 your vote.
11 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Thank you,
12 Madam President. Very briefly.
13 Again, I concur with many of my
14 colleagues who said this has been a good
15 debate. It would be a better debate if we
16 would go forward -- and Senator Volker raised
17 this earlier -- and conduct some hearings and
18 get the facts on the table.
19 The truth of the matter is we're
20 hearing a lot of assertions and as to whether
21 or not they're true, I think we have only
22 faith and hope to back them up. It's time
23 again to seriously revisit this issue. But I
24 would urge Senator Volker that if he thinks
25 New York State has all these protections and
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1 that racism is over in the State of New York,
2 that he take a look at the report of the Bar
3 Association of the City of New York that I
4 referred to earlier. There are serious
5 questions about this.
6 And once again, after a Republican
7 governor in Massachusetts -- nothing to do
8 with the Kennedys -- appointed a commission to
9 look at their death penalty, they made
10 recommendations for 10 essential safeguards to
11 make sure no innocent person was executed.
12 Nine of those 10 are lacking in New York
13 State's current criminal law.
14 And finally, as far as the issue
15 that was raised by Senator Nozzolio in his
16 colloquy with Senator Krueger, I would commend
17 to you a monograph called "The Myth of Prison
18 Murder: Lifers and the Death Penalty," by
19 Equal Justice USA, which makes it clear that
20 after statistical analyses, 90 percent of
21 prison murders occur in jurisdictions that do
22 have the death penalty.
23 So there's a lot more for us to
24 discuss. I think a lot of good points have
25 been made. Let's have some hearings and get
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1 the latest information on the table before we
2 move forward with this.
3 Thank you, Madam President. I'll
4 be voting no.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
6 you. Senator Schneiderman will recorded in
7 the negative.
8 Senator Diaz, to explain your vote.
9 SENATOR DIAZ: Thank you, Madam
10 President.
11 As I said before, my only daughter
12 is a police officer, a sergeant in the City of
13 New York. I love my daughter. I love police
14 officers. I love correctional officers. I
15 love peace officers. And I also love unborn
16 babies. They have been killed, they have been
17 killed by dozens, thousands every year.
18 So I respect life in all shapes and
19 forms. I don't understand why those that want
20 to kill babies are opposing the death penalty
21 and those that are for the death penalty
22 oppose the killing of babies. It does not
23 make sense.
24 Life is sacred. I deeply respect
25 life. I do not believe in killing anyone. I
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1 believe that the life of my daughter, who is a
2 police officer, yeah, it's valued to me, and I
3 don't know what I'd do if she gets hurt. But
4 it doesn't -- it's not worth more than the
5 life of a child that has been killed by a
6 rapist or by a woman that has been killed by a
7 rapist. And it isn't worth more than the life
8 of a bodeguero that has been killed in the
9 bodega, in the grocery store.
10 So yes, it has worth to me, and I
11 love my daughter. But go and tell that to a
12 senior citizen or to the mother of a child
13 that has been raped and killed or to a woman
14 that has been battered and killed, their
15 family, go tell them that. So all life are
16 equal, all life are sacred, all life have the
17 same value. You don't kill one and not the
18 other. If you're going to kill, kill
19 everybody. There are people that would like
20 to kill everybody.
21 Me, I don't believe in killing. I
22 don't believe in the death penalty. I don't
23 believe in abortion. I believe that life is
24 sacred. God give it, God take it. I'm --
25 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Senator
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1 Diaz. Senator Diaz, excuse me --
2 SENATOR DIAZ: I vote against the
3 bill.
4 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
5 you. Your two minutes were up.
6 Senator Diaz will be recorded in
7 the negative.
8 And the Secretary will announce the
9 results.
10 THE SECRETARY: Those recorded in
11 the negative on Calendar Number 455 are
12 Senators Andrews, Breslin, Connor, Coppola,
13 Diaz, Dilan, Duane, Gonzalez,
14 Hassell-Thompson, L. Krueger, Montgomery,
15 Oppenheimer, Parker, Paterson, Sabini,
16 Sampson, Savino, Schneiderman, Serrano,
17 A. Smith, M. Smith, Stavisky and Valesky.
18 Absent from voting: Senator C.
19 Kruger.
20 Ayes, 37. Nays, 23.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
22 bill is passed.
23 Senator Skelos.
24 SENATOR SKELOS: Madam President,
25 if we could call up Senate Number 1045.
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1 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
2 Secretary will read.
3 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
4 1045, by Senator Young, Senate Print 6276, an
5 act to amend the Criminal Procedure Law.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Read
7 the last section.
8 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
9 act shall take effect immediately.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Call
11 the roll.
12 (The Secretary called the roll.)
13 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Senator
14 Duane, to explain his vote.
15 SENATOR DUANE: Thank you, Madam
16 President.
17 I'm going to be voting against this
18 bill because it doesn't include domestic
19 partners in the list of people who could make
20 a statement on behalf of a victim.
21 And, you know, it's 2006. And it
22 says "spouse," the bill says "except where
23 such victim is deceased and survived by both a
24 spouse and a parent." And that it doesn't say
25 "domestic partner" is just -- I just -- you
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1 know, it's 2006. Come on. Equal rights.
2 Spouse, domestic partner should be included.
3 So I would encourage my colleagues
4 to vote no on this, and then I hope that it
5 will come back to us and say "spouse" and
6 "domestic partner" both.
7 Thank you, Madam President.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
9 you. Senator Duane will be recorded in the
10 negative.
11 Senator Young, to explain her vote.
12 SENATOR YOUNG: Thank you, Madam
13 President, to explain my vote.
14 I think it's very appropriate that
15 we're passing this legislation in the Senate
16 today, based on all the very healthy debate
17 that we just had on the death penalty and also
18 as it relates to penalties given to those who
19 would kill police officers.
20 This bill actually is based on an
21 actual case from 1997 when Patrolman Anthony
22 Sanchez was gunned down in New York City
23 during a robbery. And during the sentencing
24 portion of the trial, both his mother and his
25 wife wanted to give an impact statement and
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1 were unable to do so. So this would correct
2 that part of the law.
3 And it really only is right. I've
4 dealt with many victims' families over the
5 years since I was elected to the State
6 Legislature, and it should be the option, the
7 discretion of the court to allow more than one
8 family member to give their perspective, their
9 context. For example, a mother's context
10 would be very different than a spouse. And we
11 need to correct the law. We shouldn't have to
12 choose between family members.
13 Senator Maziarz talked about a case
14 that I worked on during the previous debate
15 with Penny's Law, when Penny Brown was killed
16 in 1999 on Mother's Day, she jogged. And the
17 juvenile who killed her was tried as an adult
18 but still got a juvenile sentence. And one
19 word kept coming to the family's mind all
20 throughout the trial, was that they felt like
21 they were helpless. They were helpless.
22 There wasn't much that they could do.
23 However, when it came to
24 sentencing, only one family member was able to
25 testify. And they chose Kaitlyn Brown, who
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1 was 13 years old when her mother was killed.
2 She was 14 at the time of the trial. And one
3 of the things that she said was: "Sometimes I
4 still whisper the word 'mom' just so I can
5 hear it again."
6 Kaitlyn was able to give her
7 perspective, but Penny also left behind a
8 husband and two grieving parents. And they
9 say to me many times over they wish they could
10 have given their perspective during the
11 sentencing portion of the trial.
12 Victims need and deserve to have a
13 voice. This bill corrects that issue.
14 Appropriate sentences must be given for these
15 terrible crimes. I would urge my colleagues
16 to vote yes on this very important piece of
17 legislation.
18 Thank you, Madam President.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
20 you, Senator Young. You will be recorded in
21 the affirmative.
22 The Secretary will announce the
23 results.
24 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 58. Nays,
25 3. Senators Andrews, Connor and Duane
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1 recorded in the negative.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
3 bill is passed.
4 Senator Skelos.
5 SENATOR SKELOS: Madam President,
6 there will be an immediate meeting of the
7 Rules Committee in the Majority Conference
8 Room.
9 And if we could return to the order
10 of motions and resolutions.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
12 you.
13 There's an immediate meeting of the
14 Rules Committee in the Senate Conference Room.
15 Motions and resolutions.
16 Could we have it quiet while people
17 are leaving the chamber.
18 Senator Nozzolio.
19 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Thank you,
20 Madam President.
21 I wish to call up my bill, Print
22 Number 503A, recalled from the Assembly, which
23 is now at the desk.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
25 Secretary will read.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
2 1377, by Senator Nozzolio, Senate Print 503A,
3 an act to amend the Criminal Procedure Law.
4 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Madam
5 President, I move to reconsider the vote by
6 which the bill was passed and ask that the
7 bill be restored to the order of third
8 reading.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Call
10 the roll on reconsideration of the vote.
11 (The Secretary called the roll.)
12 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 61.
13 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Madam
14 President, I now move to recommit Senate Print
15 Number 503A, Calendar Number 1377, to the
16 Committee on Codes, with instructions to said
17 committee to strike the enacting clause.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: So
19 ordered.
20 Senator Fuschillo.
21 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Madam
22 President, on behalf of Senator Meier, on page
23 number 28 I offer the following amendments to
24 Calendar Number 737, Senate Print Number 7042,
25 and ask that said bill retain its place on
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1 Third Reading Calendar.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
3 amendments are received, and the bill will
4 retain its place on the Third Reading
5 Calendar.
6 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Madam
7 President, amendments are offered to the
8 following Third Reading Calendar bills:
9 Sponsored by Senator Young, page
10 35, Calendar Number 877, Senate Print Number
11 6562A;
12 By Senator Maltese, page number 58,
13 Calendar Number 1301, Senate Print Number
14 7677;
15 By Senator LaValle, page number 68,
16 Calendar Number 1426, Senate Print Number
17 3113A;
18 By Senator Flanagan, page number
19 72, Calendar Number 1480, Senate Print Number
20 7621;
21 By Senator LaValle, page number 74,
22 Calendar Number 1503, Senate Print Number
23 7690;
24 By Senator Farley, page number 58,
25 Calendar Number 1291, Senate Print Number
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1 7764;
2 By Senator Balboni, page number 37,
3 Calendar Number 923, Senate Print Number 7681;
4 By Senator LaValle, page number 6,
5 Calendar Number 172, Senate Print Number
6 1092B;
7 By Senator Young, page number 27,
8 Calendar Number 708, Senate Print Number 7053;
9 By Senator Morahan, page number 53,
10 Calendar Number 1226, Senate Print Number
11 4103.
12 I now move that these bills retain
13 their place on the order of third reading.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
15 you. The amendments are received, and the
16 bills will retain their place on the Third
17 Reading Calendar.
18 Senator Bonacic.
19 SENATOR BONACIC: Thank you,
20 Madam President.
21 On behalf of Senator Balboni, I
22 wish to call up Bill Number 7358A, having
23 passed both houses and not delivered to the
24 Governor.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
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1 you.
2 The Secretary will read.
3 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
4 863, by Senator Balboni, Senate Print 7358A,
5 an act to amend the Eminent Domain Procedure
6 Law.
7 SENATOR BONACIC: Madam
8 President, I now move to reconsider the vote
9 by which this bill was passed and ask that the
10 bill be restored to the order of third
11 reading.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
13 Secretary will call the roll for
14 reconsideration of the vote.
15 (The Secretary called the roll.)
16 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 61.
17 SENATOR BONACIC: Thank you,
18 Madam President. I now offer up the following
19 amendments.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
21 amendments are received.
22 SENATOR BONACIC: Thank you.
23 I have another bill, Madam
24 President. I wish to call up, again on behalf
25 of Senator Balboni, Bill Print Number 7266,
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1 recalled from the Assembly, which is now at
2 the desk.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
4 Secretary will read.
5 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
6 982, by Senator Balboni, Senate Print 7266, an
7 act to authorize.
8 SENATOR BONACIC: I now move to
9 reconsider the vote by which the bill was
10 passed.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
12 Secretary will call the roll on
13 reconsideration of the vote.
14 (The Secretary called the roll.)
15 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 61.
16 SENATOR BONACIC: Madam
17 President, I now offer the following
18 amendments.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
20 amendments are received.
21 SENATOR BONACIC: And last but
22 not least, on behalf of Senator Larkin, I wish
23 to call up Print Number 3243, recalled from
24 the Assembly, which is now at the desk.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
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1 Secretary will read.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 1569, by Senator Larkin, Senate Print 3243, an
4 act to amend the Education Law.
5 SENATOR BONACIC: I now move to
6 reconsider the vote by which the bill was
7 passed.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
9 Secretary will call the roll on
10 reconsideration of the vote.
11 (The Secretary called the roll.)
12 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 61.
13 SENATOR BONACIC: Madam
14 President, I now offer the following
15 amendments.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
17 amendments are received.
18 SENATOR BONACIC: Thank you.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Senator
20 Morahan.
21 SENATOR MORAHAN: Yes, Madam
22 President. The remaining bills on the active
23 list that were laid aside will be laid aside
24 for the day.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Those
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1 bills are laid aside for the day.
2 SENATOR MORAHAN: We're just
3 waiting for the Rules report, and then we'll
4 do a noncontroversial calendar.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
6 you.
7 Senator Morahan.
8 SENATOR MORAHAN: Yes, Madam
9 President. Could we please return to reports
10 of standing committees.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Reports
12 of standing committees.
13 The Secretary will read.
14 THE SECRETARY: Senator Bruno,
15 from the Committee on Rules, reports the
16 following bills:
17 Senate Print 207, by Senator
18 Maziarz, an act to amend the Mental Hygiene
19 Law;
20 321, by Senator Padavan, an act to
21 amend the County Law;
22 447A, by Senator Larkin, an act to
23 amend the Tax Law;
24 509, by Senator Nozzolio, an act to
25 repeal;
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1 1773B, by Senator Fuschillo, an act
2 to amend the Environmental Conservation Law;
3 2205, by Senator Golden, an act to
4 amend the Penal Law and the Railroad Law;
5 3305A, by Senator Wright, an act to
6 amend the Not-For-Profit Corporation Law;
7 3329, by Senator DeFrancisco, an
8 act to amend the Penal Law;
9 3512A, by Senator Leibell, an act
10 authorizing;
11 3794B, by Senator Leibell, an act
12 to amend the Tax Law;
13 4464, by Senator Leibell, an act to
14 amend the Tax Law;
15 4564, by Senator Trunzo, an act in
16 relation to authorizing;
17 5030, by Senator Golden, an act to
18 amend the Penal Law and the Vehicle and
19 Traffic Law;
20 5114A, by Senator Spano, an act to
21 amend the Education Law;
22 5240A, by Senator Wright, an act to
23 amend the Public Service Law;
24 5768, by Senator Golden, an act to
25 amend the Penal Law;
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1 5813A, by Senator Golden, an act to
2 amend the Real Property Tax Law;
3 6224A, by Senator Maziarz, an act
4 to amend the Vehicle and Traffic Law;
5 6402A, by Senator Balboni, an act
6 to amend the General Business Law;
7 6427A, by Senator Little, an act to
8 amend the Vehicle and Traffic Law;
9 6597A, by Senator Morahan, an act
10 to amend the Real Property Tax Law;
11 6628, by Senator Spano, an act to
12 amend the Social Services Law;
13 6660, by Senator Oppenheimer, an
14 act to amend the Town Law;
15 6693B, by Senator Larkin, an act to
16 amend the Agriculture and Markets Law;
17 6694A, by Senator Larkin, an act to
18 amend the Agriculture and Markets Law;
19 6891A, by Senator Golden, an act to
20 amend the Not-For-Profit Corporation Law;
21 7641A, by Senator Meier, an act to
22 amend the Social Services Law;
23 7927, by Senator Golden, an act to
24 amend the Criminal Procedure Law and the
25 Executive Law;
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1 7928, by Senator Golden, an act to
2 amend the Penal Law;
3 7936, by Senator Johnson, an act to
4 amend the Real Property Tax Law;
5 7962, by Senator Marchi, an act to
6 amend the Vehicle and Traffic Law;
7 8011, by Senator Bonacic, an act
8 authorizing;
9 8044, by Senator Padavan, an act to
10 amend the Family Court Act;
11 8080, by Senator Spano, an act to
12 amend the Public Authorities Law;
13 8091, by Senator Maziarz, an act
14 establishing;
15 And Senate Print 8179, by Senator
16 Bruno, an act to amend the Social Services
17 Law.
18 All bills ordered direct to third
19 reading.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Senator
21 Morahan.
22 SENATOR MORAHAN: I move that we
23 accept the report of the Rules Committee.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: All in
25 favor of accepting the report of the Rules
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1 Committee signify by saying aye.
2 (Response of "Aye.")
3 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE:
4 Opposing, nay.
5 (No response.)
6 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
7 report is accepted.
8 Senator Morahan.
9 SENATOR MORAHAN: Madam
10 President, if we could pick up 1699, by
11 Senator Bruno.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
13 you.
14 The Secretary will read.
15 THE SECRETARY: In relation to
16 Calendar Number 1699, Senator Bruno moves to
17 discharge, from the Committee on Rules,
18 Assembly Bill Number 11809 and substitute it
19 for the identical Senate Bill Number 8179,
20 Third Reading Calendar 1699.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
22 substitution is ordered.
23 The Secretary will read.
24 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
25 1699, by the Assembly Committee on Rules,
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1 Assembly Print Number 11809, an act to amend
2 the Social Services Law.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Read
4 the last section.
5 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
6 act shall take effect immediately.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Call
8 the roll.
9 (The Secretary called the roll.)
10 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 61.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: The
12 bill is passed.
13 Senator Morahan.
14 SENATOR MORAHAN: I believe we
15 have another motion, Madam President, by
16 Senator Seward.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
18 you.
19 Senator Seward.
20 SENATOR SEWARD: Yes, Madam
21 President, on page 66 I offer the following
22 amendments to Calendar Number 1407, Senate
23 Print Number 6332A, and ask that the said bill
24 retain its place on the Third Reading
25 Calendar. I do this on behalf of Senator
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1 Marchi.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: Thank
3 you.
4 The amendments are received, and
5 the bill will retain its place on the Third
6 Reading Calendar.
7 Senator Morahan.
8 SENATOR MORAHAN: Yes, Madam
9 President. There being no further business
10 before the Senate, I move that the Senate
11 adjourn until Wednesday, June 14th, at
12 11:00 a.m.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT LITTLE: On
14 motion, the Senate stands adjourned until
15 Wednesday, June 14th, at 11:00 a.m.
16 (Whereupon, at 5:07 p.m., the
17 Senate adjourned.)
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