ALBANY – A Long Island serial killer of prostitutes was spared execution yesterday by the state’s top court, although the judges upheld his three murder convictions.
In commuting the death sentence of Robert Shulman yesterday, the court cited a previous ruling finding a major sentencing component of the state capital-punishment law unconstitutional, a flaw that has not been fixed by the Legislature because of concerns by the Democrat-controlled Assembly.
The court has sent the case back to Suffolk County for resentencing.
Shulman, 51, was convicted of murdering and dismembering three prostitutes and dumping their bodies in Suffolk and Brooklyn in the mid-1990s.
The court unanimously rejected his arguments that his convictions should be overturned because police lacked probable cause to arrest him and the trial court abused its discretion in its dealings with the jury. It is the fifth death sentence to be vacated out of five challenges heard by the Court of Appeals since capital punishment was restored in the state in 1995.
A sixth death sentence was vacated at the trial-court level, leaving John Taylor, who was convicted of killing five people at a Wendy’s restaurant in Queens during a robbery, as the only remaining murderer on death row out of the original seven.