FORMER Suffolk County District Attorney James M. Catterson Jr. sought the death penalty in three cases after capital punishment was reinstated in 1995, winning a jury verdict for death each time. As a result, half of the six inmates now on New York’s death row – Robert Shulman, Stephen LaValle and Nicholson McCoy – were all convicted in Suffolk County. The remaining three were sentenced to die by juries in Kings, Monroe, and Onondaga counties.
Suffolk, partly suburban and partly rural, is hardly the most crime-ridden of the state’s 62 counties, with just 15 first-degree murder indictments in the past seven years. That represents about one-fifth the number handed down in Brooklyn, a quarter of those in the Bronx or half of those in Queens.
