DEATH PENALTY DOOMED 
The Court of Appeals has reaffirmed a decision it made three years ago and tossed out the last remaining death penalty conviction in New York State, ruling that it’s the Legislature’s job to fix a coercive provision. The New York Times and The New York Law Journal have the story. In the so-called Wendy’s Massacre, John B. Taylor and an accomplice forced five Wendy’s employees into a walk-in cooler and shot them. In 2002, then-Queens Supreme Court Justice Steven W. Fisher thought he’d found a way around the New York death penalty’s unusual provision that a judge tell a jury in a capital case that, should they deadlock over death or life-without-parole as the punishment, he would impose a parole-eligible sentence of between 20 and 25 years to life. In a split decision in 2004, the state’s highest court found such instructions unconstitutional on the assumption that deadlocked jurors might be persuaded to vote for death based on fears the defendant would ultimately be released. In this case, Fisher told jurors that if they deadlocked, he would “almost certainly” sentence Taylor to consecutive sentences; the jury then voted for a death sentence. Writing for a 4-3 majority, Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick yesterday declared that recognizing the jury charge as valid would not change the fact that the sentencing statute is unconstitutional: “Doing so would condone a trial court's remaking of an unconstitutional statute into a new statute not subject to the legislative process.” The Law Journal also offers a timeline of recent death penalty appeals in New York State.

PREPPY KILLER AND FAIRSTEIN
For those who missed it, Robert Chambers, the notorious “Preppy Killer” who spent 15 years in jail for the manslaughter death of Jennifer Levin, was arrested yesterday on charges of selling cocaine from the one-bedroom Manhattan apartment belonging to his longtime girlfriend, Shawn Kovell. The Times’s City Room blog rehashes his case with Linda Fairstein, who prosecuted the case in 1987. Interestingly, Fairstein notes that the trial judge didn’t permit a blood- and saliva stained jean jacket that might have been used to strangle Levin into evidence because DNA recovery tactics weren’t accurate enough. “Had the case been tried two years later, in 1989, when DNA was first accepted as a scientifically valid technique in an American courtroom, it would have been different,” Fairstein said.

TWO-THIRDS OF A JUDGE 
Elsewhere, The Daily News reports that a judge who admitted that he bribed former Brooklyn Democratic Party Chairman Clarence Norman to win a seat on the Brooklyn bench — a lynchpin in the investigation that resulted in Norman’s corruption conviction — has retired: with disability pay. Howard Ruditzky told a grand jury that in 2001 he paid Norman $70,000 to get the Democratic nomination. On October 2nd, Ruditzky asked the Appellate Division for a “special disability retirement allowance” that amounts to two-thirds of his $136,700 salary in exchange for his “unconditional resignation.” The agreement ends any commission probes.

SLAVERY TRIAL DELAYED 
Newsday reports on delays in the trial of Varsha and Mahender Sabhanani, the Muttontown, New York couple accused of enslaving two Indonesian housekeepers. Apparently, a microphone failed to pick up objections that the Sabhananis’ attorney, Jeffrey Hoffman, made in a deposition last week. The trial has also been delayed because of complicated jury selection proceedings. Magistrate William Wall took extra caution to ask potential jurors about their attitudes toward immigration and naturalization, their own hiring of housekeepers, and their awareness of media coverage.

JUDGE AND JUDGED
Finally, The Village Voice weighs in with a colorful assessment of the R. Lindley DeVecchio bench trial (before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach, whom we profiled last week). The most interesting bit of the proceedings might be the culturally entangled histories of judge and judged: Reichbach is a former 60's civil rights protester whose courtroom memorabilia collection includes a portrait of Paul Robeson, the black actor who refused to sign an affidavit affirming that he was not a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee; DeVecchio, meanwhile, joined the FBI in the years before it labeled Reichbach “one of the most dangerous” members of Columbia University’s Students for a Democratic Society.