Earlier this week attorneys walked into an Albany courtroom to plead a case before the State’s highest court. 

It was a case that Queens D.A. Richard Brown and a host of state district attorneys were paying very close attention to, since what happens will play a huge role in how they conduct certain prosecutions from now on.

The lawyers were there to plead that Darryl Harris be spared from getting a needle put into his veins and being euthenized like a dog or cat that has overstayed its welcome at a shelter. 

They argued to the seven-member panel that the Brooklyn jury that convicted Harris should not have heard that one of his victims pleaded for her life before he stabbed her – the mother of five – moments after he shot two other men.

Murder and mayhem are not uncommon details in murder trials but this one is of significance because if his lawyers are not persuasive enough, Harris will be the first person put to death in New York State since 1963, and since Governor George Pataki signed the death penalty back into law in 1995.

Harris, a former corrections officer was convicted of killing two men and a woman at a Brooklyn nightclub on Dec. 7, 1997.  

Of his guilt, there is no argument, but his lawyers argued that Harris was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. 

He walked into a bathroom, came out and announced a robbery.

He shot two men and then aimed for a woman named Evelyn Davis. 

He missed and Davis lunged at him and pleaded with him.

“Don’t kill me, I’ve got five babies,” she said.

“Sorry,” he supposedly replied before plunging a knife into her.

One of the requirements for the death penalty is supposed to be “depraved indifference to human life.” 

In other words, it means the accused may have thought to themselves, “I know that you are a person who wants to live. And even though you are no physical threat to me I’m going to take your life anyway because I don’t care.”

If this is true, in any case, it most likely is in that of John Taylor, the so-called mastermind of the Wendy’s massacre.

Brown, while personally opposed to the death penalty, has promised to vigorously pursue the execution of Taylor for the execution- style murders he allegedly choreographed, by herding employees of the Flushing restaurant into a secluded area, covering their heads with plastic and shooting them in the head, one by one.

Although it is a painful notion to know the death penalty has been unevenly applied to people of color ever since its inception, I have no such regrets of its application to Harris, Taylor or any other “evil spirit’ that walks the earth in search of death and destruction.

There is a look that people and even some animals have when you look into their eyes.  There is a liveliness, and sense of life, and anticipation in the way the iris and pupils bounce.  

In some there is no such look.  

There is a blank, almost bottomless stare that I call “the dead eyes” look.  

To me it is the stare of someone who either doesn’t have a soul or has somehow lost it along the way.  

I see that look in many people in my life as a reporter and I can only wonder what kind of trouble the person is headed for and who will be the sorry individual to get in their way when trouble finds them.

The unfortunate reality is that there are people in our world who not only kill but do so without any regret – with no more thought about the ramifications than if they were flicking off a light switch.

It is these people who do not deserve our compassion and should not be allowed to live among us on any scale. 

For those who are not that depraved, well for me let’s check them out on a case by case basis as circumstances permit.

— Gary Anthony Ramsay is a weekend anchor
and journalist on the all-news
cable station NY1 and along-time resident of Queens.