When the Revolution transformed New York from a British colony into a state a question arose: what would republican justice entail? This chapter reveals that the bloody code continued to operate for the first two decades of the state’s history. The first constitution, of 1777, assigned authority to the legislature to pardon in cases of murder and treason, which required the governor to share his discretionary powers with legislators. The first governor, George Clinton, was a military as well as a political leader who granted pardons and military paroles for tactical purposes as a tool of war. In the early republic Clinton urged the adoption of Enlightenment principles of mildness and certainty in punishment, but legislators resisted until 1796, when New York’s penitentiary era began.
