Mario Cuomo a Rare Voice Against the Death Penalty in Tough on Crime Era

As Republicans and many Democrats rallied behind Capital 

 punishment, Cuomo never wavered in abolitionist views

The progressive legacy of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who died Thursday at the age of 82, spans many milestones, from calling out President Ronald Reagan's “City on a Hill” to expanding health care. His consistent opposition to the death penalty was especially notable, given the tough-on-crime rhetoric that reigned during much of his career. Over the course of his governorship, he vetoed 12 bills that would have reinstated the death penalty in the state – one for every year he was in office.
"The death penalty legitimizes the ultimate act of vengeance in the name of the state, violates fundamental human rights, fuels a mistaken belief by some that justice is being served and demeans those who strive to preserve human life and dignity," Cuomo said when vetoing one such proposal in 1991.
At the time, the death penalty was wildly popular, both with politicians and with the public – for much of the 1980s and and early 1990s, more than three-quarters of Americans favored it. Some blamed Cuomo's defeat to fellow democrat Ed Koch in the 1977 mayoral run-off on Cuomo's opposition to capital punishment. However, once he won the New York governorship in 1982, Cuomo never backed away from his abolitionist views, even refusing to extradite convicted murderer Thomas Grasso, who was being incarcerated in the state, to Oklahoma, where Grasso had been sentenced to death.



Meanwhile, the use of the capital punishment expanded across the country after the Supreme Court reversed a previous ruling that had suspended it and allowed Georgia execute a convicted murder in 1976. With new guidelines being set by the court, states reinstated the death penalty, many using lethal injection for the first time. During his 1992 presidential campaign, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton returned to his home state to oversee the execution of a convicted murderer who was believed to be severely brain injured from when he tried to shoot himself. By 1994, Congress had passed a bill that added more than 40 federal offenses that could be punished by death penalty, including kidnappings that result in death, drive-by shootings that result in death, sexual abuses that result in death and certain drug-related crimes. ​

A Roman Catholic, Cuomo’s stance was moral one, but he often backed up his opposition to the death penalty by citing criminologists who said it didn’t deter crime.

“As a deterrent, the death penalty is surprisingly ineffective,” he wrote in his 1996 book "Reason to Believe." “No persuasive evidence exists that official state killing will make our citizens, or even our police officers, safer. There is, in fact, evidence to the contrary.”

He argued that crime was best prevented by bulking up other elements of the criminal justice system and as governor he expanded the state’s prison system at a record rate. Nevertheless, his opposition to capital punishment made him a high-profile target for politicians seeking to gin up public support for being tough on crime.
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