The state Senate voted to alter the sentencing provisions...

The state Senate voted to alter the sentencing provisions of the state's death penalty law to remove procedures declared unconstitutional in June by the state's highest court. The legislation stipulates that when a jury deadlocks over the punishment of a defendant who has been found guilty of a capital crime, that offender will get life without parole. It also creates a third option for juries deciding the correct punishment in a capital case, life in prison with the possibility of parole. On June 24 (see), the state Court of Appeals said the sentencing methods of the capital punishment statute were unconstitutional because if a jury deadlocks between execution and life without parole as the punishment, the trial judge sentences the defendant to a parole-eligible term of up to life in prison. The judges said that option might lead some undecided jurors to vote for death by lethal injection because they cannot bear the thought of a defendant someday being paroled. The ruling effectively cleared the four inmates from death row in New York and put prosecutions seeking executions for murderers on hold. The measure approved 37-22 by the Republican-controlled Senate was worked out with Gov. George Pataki. The willingness of the Democrat-dominated state Assembly to take up the bill, or any measure that might resume death penalty prosecutions is unclear. Assembly Democrats could effectively keep the death penalty statute on hold by declining to take up the bill approved by the Senate Wednesday. Democratic state Sen. Ruth Hassell-Thompson of Westchester County urged her colleagues to do just that Wednesday. "We should leave the death penalty alone," she said. "It would be foolhardy to fix it. ... We should let the death penalty die." No one has been executed under the 1995 death penalty statute, which fulfilled Pataki's 1994 campaign promise to reinstate capital punishment in New York.