The worst thing a court can do to a defendant in the United States depends on where the crime happened and when. Kansas restored capital punishment only in 1994. California’s highest court abolished it by decision in February 1972, and the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the capital statutes then in force across the country four months later. Wisconsin, Michigan and Maine gave up the death penalty in the nineteenth century. New York’s highest court struck down a mandatory death statute in 1984, and twenty years later it held the sentencing statute of a later law unconstitutional on its face.
The ten cases that follow were decided inside those borders and those years. In five of them the case ended in a prison term, and in one of those a judge said from the bench that the law alone had spared the defendant. In the other five a death sentence was imposed, and the place, the statute or the defendant’s own choices decided what became of it.
Francis Donald Nemechek was tried in Salina, where the case had been moved because of heavy publicity in western Kansas. The jury heard five counts of first-degree murder. The dead were Sheryl Lynn Young, Diane Lynn Lovette and three-year-old Guy William Young, all killed on December 13, 1974; Carla Baker, a college student, killed in June 1976; and Paula Fabrizius, 16, killed in August 1976. The Kansas Supreme Court later recorded that the two women in 1974 were shot and that the little boy died of exposure.
Nemechek’s lawyers argued insanity. Their theory, as the Supreme Court summarized it, was that he had acted out of an insane hatred of his former wife. The jury rejected it and convicted him on all five counts, and in March 1977 he was sentenced to five consecutive life terms. The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed the convictions on April 1, 1978. Those life sentences carried the possibility of parole. In July 2017 the Kansas Prisoner Review Board turned him down, and he was told he would not be eligible again until 2027.
Dennis Rader’s case came to a Kansas courtroom in 2005. Arrested on February 25, 2005, he was charged in Sedgwick County with ten counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Joseph Otero, Julie Otero and their children Josephine and Joseph II in January 1974; Kathryn Bright in April 1974; Shirley Vian in March 1977; Nancy Fox in December 1977; Marine Hedge in April 1985; Vicki Wegerle in September 1986; and Dolores Davis in January 1991.
From the start, the question of a death sentence was closed. Prosecutors said they could not seek it because the ten killings had occurred before Kansas restored capital punishment in 1994, CBS News and the Associated Press reported days after the arrest. The only contest left was over parole. The Associated Press reported that for nine of the deaths the law allowed a life sentence with parole possible after 15 years, and that prosecutors would seek a "hard 40," forty years without parole, for the killing of Dolores Davis.
On June 27, 2005, the day his trial was to begin, Rader pleaded guilty to all ten counts. On August 18, 2005, District Judge Gregory Waller ordered him to serve ten consecutive life terms, a minimum of 175 years without a chance of parole. The Lawrence Journal-World called it the longest sentence the judge could deliver, and the Associated Press put the reason in one line: Kansas had no death penalty at the time the killings were committed. Twenty years later, on the anniversary of the sentence in August 2025, KWCH reported that he was still held at the El Dorado Correctional Facility.
On February 18, 1972, the Supreme Court of California decided People v. Anderson. By a vote of six to one, it held that capital punishment was both cruel and unusual under the state constitution and that "death may not be exacted as punishment for crime in this state." On June 29 of the same year, in Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court of the United States held that the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty in the cases before it was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Five justices supported the judgment, and four dissented.
Edmund Kemper’s killings in Santa Cruz County took place in 1972 and 1973. He was charged with eight counts of first-degree murder: seven women, one of them his mother and another her best friend, and a 15-year-old girl. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Court-appointed psychiatrists declared him sane, United Press International later reported, and a jury convicted him of all eight counts in 1973. He was sentenced to life in prison.
The life sentence has brought him before the parole board again and again. He had been turned down four times by 1985, when he waived a hearing. On July 9, 2024, at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, a panel denied him again. It was the twelfth time he had become eligible since his conviction, Lookout Santa Cruz reported. He was 75, refused to attend, and his next hearing was set seven years away.
Wisconsin settled the question in the 1850s. The legislature limited the death penalty to first-degree murder in 1849, and John McCaffary of Kenosha, convicted in 1851 of murdering his wife, was the only person executed under that law. His public hanging before a crowd of several thousand, the legal historian Joseph A. Ranney writes in a history published by the Wisconsin court system, revived the campaign against capital punishment, and in 1853 the state abolished it.
Jeffrey Dahmer was prosecuted under that settlement in 1992. He pleaded guilty but insane to fifteen counts of first-degree intentional homicide in Milwaukee County, and the only question for the jury was his mental state. On February 15, 1992, the jury rejected the insanity claim, UPI reported. On February 17, 1992, Judge Gram sentenced him to fifteen consecutive life terms. Wisconsin had no death penalty, the Associated Press noted, and his lawyer said there would be no appeal.
On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was killed by another prisoner, Christopher Scarver, at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage. He was 34.
Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck met through the mail-order lonely hearts clubs of the late 1940s, and from late 1947 they traveled together, Beck posing as his sister, while he courted widows and took their money. Janet Fay, a widow from Albany, New York, was killed on January 4, 1949, in Valley Stream, in Nassau County. Weeks later the pair were in Michigan, staying with another widow, Delphine Downing, who lived near Grand Rapids with her small daughter. Michigan police arrested them on February 28, 1949, in connection with the deaths of the mother and child.
Michigan’s choice had been made a century earlier. In 1846, a Michigan House legislative analysis later recorded, the state became the first government in the English-speaking world to abolish capital punishment, keeping it only for treason, a crime for which no one in the state was ever convicted. The ban was written into the state constitution in 1962: "No law shall be enacted for the penalty of death."
New York had no such rule. Bernard Ryan Jr., in Great American Trials, and Bob Cudmore, in a 2024 history column for The Recorder, give the same reason for what happened next: New York had the death penalty for murder and Michigan did not. The couple were extradited to stand trial for the death of Janet Fay.
The trial ran from June 9 to August 18, 1949, before Justice Ferdinand Pecora. The jury deliberated for about 12 and a half hours and convicted both of murder in the first degree, a verdict that carried a mandatory sentence of death. The New York Court of Appeals refused a new trial, Governor Thomas E. Dewey turned down their plea for clemency, and the Supreme Court of the United States declined to review the case. Fernandez and Beck were executed at Sing Sing Prison on March 8, 1951, he first and she after him. The deaths of Delphine Downing and her daughter were never tried in New York.
Maine abolished the death penalty for all crimes in 1876, restored it for first-degree murder in 1883, and abolished it for good in 1887 under a statute titled "An act to abolish the Death Penalty," according to the legislative history kept by the Maine State Law and Legislative Reference Library.
John Joubert grew up in Portland, Maine. On August 22, 1982, Ricky Stetson, 11, was killed in Portland. Joubert left the city that December to join the Air Force and was later stationed at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. In the fall of 1983 two boys were killed in Sarpy County: Danny Joe Eberle, 13, of Bellevue, in September, and Christopher Walden, 12, of Papillion, in December. Joubert was charged in January 1984. On July 3 he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder.
Under Nebraska law, his sentence went to a panel of three judges, who weighed the statutory aggravating and mitigating circumstances and, on October 9, 1984, sentenced him to death on both counts. In 1986 a grand jury in Cumberland County, Maine, indicted him for the murder of Ricky Stetson. For four years Nebraska kept him on death row while the attorneys general of the two states tried to arrange a transfer. In January 1990 they reached an executive agreement, and he was moved to Maine.
The trial was held in Lincoln County. On October 15, 1990, the jury convicted him of murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the conviction on February 21, 1992, calling the evidence linking him to the killing "overwhelming."
Nebraska’s sentences went through a different kind of review. In October 1994 a federal district court set them aside, holding that the phrase "exceptional depravity" in the aggravating circumstance used against him was unconstitutionally vague. On January 25, 1996, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and reinstated the death sentences. Nebraska executed Joubert in the electric chair on July 17, 1996, Amnesty International confirmed the next day. Maine had answered the killing of Ricky Stetson with life imprisonment. Nebraska answered the Sarpy County killings with death.
Lemuel Smith was already serving two terms of 25 years to life for the second-degree murders of Robert Hedderman and Margaret Byron when Donna Payant, a 31-year-old correction officer who had been on the job about a month, was killed at Green Haven Correctional Facility on May 15, 1981. By August, UPI reported, Smith had been charged with first-degree murder. For a prisoner already serving a life term, that charge carried one sentence only: death.
A Dutchess County jury convicted him on April 21, 1983. On June 10, in Poughkeepsie, Justice Albert Rosenblatt of the State Supreme Court imposed the mandatory sentence. UPI reported that Smith, then 41, would be the first person put to death in New York’s electric chair in 20 years, the last having been Eddie Lee Mays in 1963, and noted that the constitutionality of the law was already in doubt.
It did not hold. In 1984 the New York Court of Appeals declared the mandatory death statute unconstitutional in Smith’s own case. As the federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit described the ruling later that year, the state court vacated the death sentence, reduced the conviction to second-degree murder and returned the case for resentencing. Three years later, in Sumner v. Shuman, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down Nevada’s mandatory death sentence for prisoners serving life without parole who commit murder, by a vote of six to three. The opinion counted eleven states that had carried such statutes in the 1970s and cited the New York decision in Smith’s case as one of the state rulings that had struck them down.
Smith has denied killing Payant. In 2025 her son, who spent 28 years as a prison officer himself, told WRGB in Albany that he did not believe Smith had done it and asked for the case to be reopened. In 2024 Smith was held at Wende Correctional Facility in Erie County, where he had settled a federal lawsuit over decades of solitary confinement, WNYT reported.
Benjamin and Edith Shaffer were retirees traveling through Mendocino County in their motor home in July 1982. Robert Wayne Danielson was arrested in Odessa, Texas, on April 5, 1984, and tried in Mendocino County Superior Court for their burglary, robbery, kidnapping and murder. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder and sustained the special-circumstance allegations, which put the question of death before the jury.
At the penalty phase the prosecution put before the jury his earlier conviction for voluntary manslaughter and evidence of violent acts for which he had never been tried. Then, on cross-examination and over a defense objection, the prosecutor asked Danielson what punishment he thought was appropriate. "If I were one of the 12 jurors, I would vote for the death penalty," he answered, as the Supreme Court of California later quoted him. The jury returned a verdict of death, and judgment was entered on November 13, 1986.
The California Supreme Court affirmed on October 22, 1992. The majority held that the question was proper, because Danielson had put his remorse in issue on direct examination. Justices Mosk and Kennard agreed that the conviction should stand but dissented from the death sentence; Kennard wrote that a defendant’s opinion of his own penalty is not a factor the law allows a jury to weigh. The Supreme Court of the United States declined review on June 21, 1993. Danielson was never executed. He died on death row at San Quentin on September 7, 1995, a death the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office lists as a suicide.
Edward Wayne Edwards was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1933. In August 1977 Billy Lavaco, 21, and Judy Straub, 18, a young couple, were killed in Norton, Ohio. Their deaths came to light there on August 8, 1977. In August 1980 a second young couple, Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, both 19, were killed in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, where Edwards and his family had moved that summer. In 1996 his foster son, born Daniel Gloeckner and known as Dannie Boy Edwards, was killed near Burton, in Geauga County, Ohio. None of the three cases was solved at the time.
Edwards was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 30, 2009, after a cold-case investigation of the Wisconsin killings. Within a year he had pleaded guilty to all four of the earlier killings. On June 11, 2010, he was sentenced in Akron for the Norton deaths to consecutive life terms, with parole eligibility after ten years on each. The death penalty was not an option: "The death penalty in Ohio in 1977 was ruled unconstitutional," Cleveland 19 News reported. In Lockett v. Ohio, decided July 3, 1978, the Supreme Court of the United States had held the state’s statute unconstitutional because it allowed too narrow a range of mitigating circumstances. "Bottom line, he isn’t ever leaving prison," the Summit County prosecutor, Sherri Bevan Walsh, said. On June 21, 2010, Judge William F. Hue of the Jefferson County Circuit Court imposed two life sentences for the Wisconsin killings.
A week before that hearing, in a jailhouse interview with the Associated Press, Edwards admitted a fifth killing, that of his foster son. "I’m responsible for it," he said, and he told the reporter he would "rather be executed than fester in prison." Homicide was a capital crime in Ohio, the Associated Press explained, but a U.S. Supreme Court ruling had invalidated the state’s death penalty statutes from 1974 to 1978, making him ineligible for execution for the Norton killings. The 1996 killing carried no such bar.
A Geauga County grand jury indicted him for aggravated murder, aggravated robbery and kidnapping. On March 8, 2011, Edwards, then 77, pleaded guilty before a three-judge panel and was sentenced to death by lethal injection, the sentence he had asked for. His execution was set for August 31, 2011. He died of natural causes at the Corrections Medical Center in Columbus on April 7, 2011, the Daily Jefferson County Union reported.
Between July and November 2012, three shopkeepers were shot dead in Brooklyn in separate killings: Mohamed Gebeli, 65, in Bay Ridge; Isaac Kadare, 59, in Bensonhurst; and Rahmatollah Vahidipour, 78, in Flatbush. Salvatore Perrone, a clothing salesman from Staten Island who was then 63, was arrested days after the third killing. In February 2016 a Brooklyn jury convicted him of three counts of second-degree murder. He denied the killings and said he had been framed.
In 2004, in People v. LaValle, the Court of Appeals held the sentencing provisions of the state’s death penalty law unconstitutional on its face because the instruction it required on a jury deadlock was coercive; in 2007 the same court refused to overturn that ruling, while noting that the legislature could reenact a statute free of the defect.
On March 4, 2016, Justice Alan Marrus sentenced Perrone to 25 years to life on each count, to run consecutively, a total of 75 years to life. "Everyone knows what I’m going to give you because that’s what you deserve, the maximum sentence the law allows," he told him, according to CBS New York. Then the judge added that Perrone was lucky New York had no death penalty, because he would have been a prime candidate for it.
Read together, the cases turn on dates and boundaries more than on the crimes. Kansas restored capital punishment in 1994, and prosecutors in Wichita could not reach back past that year. Michigan’s ban of 1846 sent Fernandez and Beck back to New York, where they died in the electric chair. Maine, without a death penalty since 1887, sentenced John Joubert to life for one killing; Nebraska executed him for two others. Because Ohio’s statutes of 1974 to 1978 had been invalidated, Edward Wayne Edwards was ineligible for execution for the Norton killings, but not for his foster son’s. New York’s highest court took death away from Lemuel Smith in 1984, and in 2016 a Brooklyn judge could only tell Salvatore Perrone that he would have been a prime candidate for a penalty the state no longer had.
• 1846: Michigan abolishes capital punishment except for treason.
• 1853: Wisconsin abolishes the death penalty.
• 1887: Maine abolishes the death penalty for good, after an 1876 repeal and an 1883 restoration.
• January 4, 1949: Janet Fay is killed in Valley Stream, New York.
• February 28, 1949: Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck are arrested in Michigan.
• June 9 to August 18, 1949: Their trial in New York ends in first-degree murder verdicts and mandatory death sentences.
• March 8, 1951: Fernandez and Beck are executed at Sing Sing.
• February 18, 1972: The Supreme Court of California decides People v. Anderson.
• June 29, 1972: The Supreme Court of the United States decides Furman v. Georgia.
• 1973: Edmund Kemper is convicted of eight counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life.
• December 13, 1974: Sheryl Lynn Young, Diane Lynn Lovette and Guy William Young are killed in western Kansas.
• March 1977: Francis Donald Nemechek is sentenced to five consecutive life terms.
• August 8, 1977: The deaths of Billy Lavaco and Judy Straub come to light in Norton, Ohio.
• July 3, 1978: The Supreme Court of the United States decides Lockett v. Ohio.
• May 15, 1981: Correction officer Donna Payant is killed at Green Haven Correctional Facility.
• June 10, 1983: Lemuel Smith is sentenced to death in Poughkeepsie.
• 1984: The New York Court of Appeals strikes down the mandatory death statute in Smith’s case.
• October 9, 1984: A Nebraska panel sentences John Joubert to death on two counts.
• November 13, 1986: Robert Wayne Danielson is sentenced to death in Mendocino County.
• June 22, 1987: The Supreme Court of the United States decides Sumner v. Shuman.
• October 15, 1990: A Maine jury convicts Joubert of the murder of Ricky Stetson; he is sentenced to life.
• February 17, 1992: Jeffrey Dahmer is sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms.
• 1994: Kansas restores capital punishment.
• November 28, 1994: Dahmer is killed by another prisoner in Portage, Wisconsin.
• September 7, 1995: Danielson dies on death row at San Quentin.
• July 17, 1996: Nebraska executes Joubert.
• 2004: The New York Court of Appeals decides People v. LaValle.
• June 27, 2005: Dennis Rader pleads guilty to ten counts of first-degree murder.
• August 18, 2005: Rader is sentenced to ten consecutive life terms.
• June 11 and June 21, 2010: Edward Wayne Edwards is sentenced to life terms in Ohio and Wisconsin.
• March 8, 2011: Edwards pleads guilty in Geauga County, Ohio, and is sentenced to death.
• April 7, 2011: Edwards dies of natural causes in Columbus, Ohio.
• February 10, 2016: Salvatore Perrone is convicted of three counts of second-degree murder.
• March 4, 2016: Perrone is sentenced to 75 years to life; the judge says New York’s lack of a death penalty spared him.
• July 9, 2024: Kemper is denied parole for the twelfth time.