NEW YORK, Feb. 11 -- The death house haunted Stephen Dalsheim for decades.
As a young man counseling inmates, he'd watch the condemned arrive at Sing Sing, a huge prison alongside the Hudson River. Dalsheim became the prison's superintendent in 1977 and found a closet filled with boxes of death row records.
At night he'd open the files and read.
"I saw what happens to the organs when men are electrocuted," said Dalsheim, 77, whose curly hair now is a cloud of white. "I know there are innocent people on death row -- I met a few of them. It's a barbaric system, and it must end."
The retired superintendent spoke publicly against the death penalty for the first time at a State Assembly hearing Friday. It's all part of an extraordinary drama playing out in New York, in which the legislature appears poised to toss out the death penalty.
Ten years ago, George E. Pataki (R) rode the death penalty issue to the governor's mansion, defeating Gov. Mario M. Cuomo (D). Soon after, Pataki and the legislature reinstated the penalty by wide margins.
Last June, however, New York's highest court struck down the law on what amounted to a technicality. Pataki supported a quick legislative fix, but the Democratic-controlled assembly balked. Now Republican and Democratic leaders alike acknowledge that the law is likely to die.
Many legislators, not least several who supported the death penalty in 1995, say much has changed. National attention has fixed on wrongful convictions, as several dozen death row inmates have been freed after evidence -- often DNA -- proved their innocence.
In Illinois in 2003, then-Gov. George Ryan (R) commuted the death sentences of 167 inmates after 13 inmates were found to have been wrongly convicted. Last week, the Kansas Supreme Court struck down that state's death penalty law, stating that it essentially forced juries -- when all evidence is equal -- to choose the death penalty instead of life in prison.
(The view is very different at the federal level, where the Clinton and Bush administrations have expanded the potential use of the death penalty for certain drug and terrorism crimes, as well as for homicide.)
Public perceptions have changed, too. In the late 1980s, crack cocaine fueled a fast-running plague of homicides and brutal robberies. Urban society seemed frayed and incapable of safeguarding its citizenry.
Now crime rates have been falling for a decade, and public clamor for the death penalty has become muted. A recent poll found that 53 percent of New Yorkers favor life sentences rather than the death penalty.
Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol (Brooklyn) watched his working-class constituents suffer and in 1995 he was one of many Democrats who voted for the death penalty. Now he's a Democratic leader -- and ready to vote against it.
"You know, as I grow older, I realize maybe we can get beyond vengeance," he said. "The death penalty is fraught with the possibility that you could execute an innocent man. Who could live with that?"
