�� HALE, from p.4
between roommates or friends who are ending
their relationship, according to 911 records.
Police rules required them to treat the dispute
as a domestic violence incident. From their arrival
in the apartment to escorting Hale out of
the building with some of his possessions and
$500 Tanner gave him, the two offi cers were on
the scene for 28 minutes.
Hale said that Tanner had previously been
violent “a couple of times like a knock on the
head,” and on that morning Tanner hit him on
the head with a phone. Hale wanted an end to
the relationship and he wanted all of his possessions
returned to him, he said. After being
escorted out of the apartment, he reentered the
building through the parking garage and waited
by Tanner’s car.
“The single thing that I wanted was to end
the relationship was to get my things and just
leave and never have to deal with this again,” he
said during the Sing Sing interview. “The thing
he told me that made me think this is never going
to end was, ‘I want you to go to your Mom’s
and then we’ll discuss it.’”
After the police left, Tanner called his niece
at his Brooklyn store and told her he would
be late. He had the locks on his apartment
changed and then went to the garage where
he encountered Hale. They fought again with
Hale knocking the older man down and hitting
his head on the cement fl oor twice. Tanner
was still alive, but bleeding when Hale put
him in the trunk of Tanner’s car. He drove the
car around Brooklyn for a time. When he heard
Tanner yelling his name and hitting the trunk
of the car, Hale opened the trunk and placed a
plastic bag over Tanner’s head. Hale eventually
drove the car, with Tanner still in the trunk,
to Kentucky where he dismembered Tanner’s
body and discarded the parts. Tanner’s body
was never found.
Hale, who readily admits he is responsible for
Tanner’s death, had no criminal record prior to
killing Tanner. Incarcerated since 1995, he has
earned an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s, and
a master’s degree. He lives on an honor block in
Sing Sing.
“I had no history of violence before this,” he
said. “Growing up in prison, I’ve never once
chosen violence as a way to deal with the stress,
the anger… For me, it’s about maximizing the
good that I can do with the time I have left.”
As his case proceeded through the Brooklyn
courts, the fi rst fl aw in New York’s death
penalty statute became apparent. Hale was the
fi rst person charged under the statute in New
York City. When Hynes announced his decision,
there were immediate protests from LGBTQ
groups that believed that Hynes would
rely on anti-gay stereotypes to win a conviction.
In 1997, he began negotiating a plea deal for
Hale with the CDO, but Albert Tomei, the judge
in Hale’s case, said he was unable to accept a
guilty plea because the plea provisions in the
Stefen Tanner, who was murdered in 1995 by Michael Shane Hale, a
man with whom he had an on-again, off-again relationship.
GAY CITY NEWS FILE PHOTO
Michael Shane Hale around the time of the Tanner murder.
statute were unconstitutional.
Tomei, who died in 2017, found that only defendants
who pleaded guilty avoided the death
penalty. And only those who asserted their Fifth
Amendment right against self-incrimination by
not pleading and asserted their Sixth Amendment
right to a trial faced a possible death sentence.
That component of the statute was coercive
and punished defendants who exercised
their constitutional rights, Tomei said. In late
1998, the Court of Appeals agreed with Tomei
and voided that part of the statute.
In 1999, Hale pleaded guilty to second-degree
murder, kidnapping, and robbery for a sentence
of 50 years-to-life. His earliest release date will
be in 2045 when he will be 73 years old.
“I couldn’t understand some of the people
who claim leadership who were suggesting
that the decision was homophobic when the
victim was also gay,” Hynes said in a 1998
LGNY interview. “Hale had an opportunity to
save Stefen’s life and instead chose to suffocate
him. The fact that I offered to accept a penalty
other than execution should be a clear indication
that where I am given an opportunity…
I am going to be inclined to do it whether the
defendant is gay, African-American, or Irish or
Italian.”
In 2004, the Court of Appeals struck down
the statute entirely after fi nding that the instructions
the law required judges to deliver to
juries were unconstitutional. Death cases had
a guilt phase where jurors had to decide if the
defendant was innocent or guilty. With a guilty
verdict, jurors then had to decide between life
without parole or death in the penalty phase.
Judges had to tell jurors that if they could not
unanimously fi nd for one penalty then the
judge would sentence the defendant to 20- or
25-to-life meaning the defendant would be eligible
for parole after serving the minimum. That
was “coercive,” the court found, and tended to
infl uence jurors to choose death. It was up to
the State Legislature to correct that fl aw, the
court said.
In contrast to the drafting of the original legislation,
which occurred behind closed doors
with no public comment, legislators held fi ve
public hearings on the death penalty in 2004
and 2005. They invited anyone to testify and
ultimately heard from 146 witnesses. Few favored
the death penalty, according to a 2008
article by James Acker, a law professor at the
University of Albany, that was published in the
Vermont Law Review.
“All these folks, years and years and years,
pro death, pro death, pro death. Where are
they?,” Acker quoted James Rogers, then the
president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys,
saying at the fi nal hearing. “The truth of
the matter is, is that when they have seen what
we have all seen throughout the country, all the
exonerated people on the evening news and the
evidence in state after state and jurisdiction after
jurisdiction, it’s hard to build up a head of
steam in favor of the death penalty.”
Andrew Cuomo, who would go onto New
York’s governor, said, “Sometimes, silence can
be deafening” at one hearing, according to Acker.
Of the 57 people who were sentenced under
the death penalty law during its short and con-
➤ HALE, continued on p.12
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