Each Thursday, we put one of our local newsmakers On The Spot.

This week: State Sen. David J. Valesky

This week's question:

Senate Republicans recently renewed the call for the death penalty for cop killers. Do you believe New York's death penalty law should be reinstated?

In late 2005, the Legislature adopted and the governor signed a law that enacted the Crimes Against Police Act. This act established life in prison without the possibility of parole for any criminal who murders a police officer or a prison guard.

I strongly supported this legislation and, along with a majority of New Yorkers, believe that life in prison without parole is the right punishment for anyone who would kill a peace officer. Life in prison could mean more than 60 years behind bars, and as such is an appropriately harsh sentence for these murders.

This year, the state Senate again passed legislation to restore the death penalty for these crimes. The Senate has passed this bill each year I have been in office, though the Assembly has never passed the bill in this time. In fact, neither this death penalty bill nor any other bill reestablishing the death penalty for other crimes has made it past the codes committee in the Assembly.

Death penalty bills fail to pass because of widespread opposition for legal, logical and moral reasons. Legal opposition focuses on the arbitrary and seemingly unequal application of the death penalty. The logical opposition rests on the fact that the death penalty is not the deterrent many claim it to be. When you look at the statistics from states with the death penalty compared with states without the death penalty, it is the states with the death penalty that have the highest per capita murder rates. An increasingly common reason cited for opposition to the death penalty is that the sanction is final and irreversible, without any margin for error on the part of the state. Each day we hear of new cases where DNA evidence exonerates someone who was falsely accused. Just imagine if Roy Brown had been sentenced to death.

Despite all these valid reasons for opposing the death penalty, my opposition is based in my own moral beliefs. I cannot be convinced that it is morally right for the state to execute criminals, no matter how strongly our collective emotions suggest it may be just.

Disagreements over the use and utility of the death penalty are not likely to end any time soon. I suspect each year this vote will continue to come up in the Senate, and each year it will fail to gain support in the Assembly.

In the meantime, I hope the public knows that any criminal convicted of killing a police officer will receive an appropriately harsh punishment - life in prison without the possibility of parole.