Oswego County District Attorney Dennis Hawthorne isn't ruling out seeking the death penalty for James Maxson, at least not yet.

Maxson is the door-to-door magazine salesman accused of killing Diana Cooper in Cooper's Fulton apartment last Wednesday evening.

Cooper suffered what a police statement called an "obvious head wound", caused by glass from broken jars from Cooper's apartment.

Maxson was found at a motel in the town of Geddes, near Syracuse, along with his colleagues.

Through secretary Mary Hibbard, District Attorney Dennis Hawthorne issued this response to Fulton Daily News.com's question about whether his office would pursue a death penalty prosecution against Maxson:

"Right at this moment, it's way too early to make a decision of that kind. (Hawthorne) said he still wants to look at all the evidence."

State statutes give the District Attorney 120 days to file a notice with the court announcing his intention to seek the death penalty.

A death penalty case would be the first of its kind in Oswego County in recent memory. New York State reinstated the death penalty a few years ago, and though several people have been sentenced to death, no execution has yet taken place.

According to the infoplease.com almanac, New York State ranks third among all states in the number of executions since 1930, carrying out 329 executions. Most, if not all, were achieved through use of the electric chair, a device first used inside the walls of Auburn State Prison.

New York State has not had an execution since 1977, however, the year after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed itself, and allowed states to resume using the death penalty.

Critics claim it is "cruel and unusual punishment", which is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution. They also claim executions are aimed disproportionately at minorities and the poor, and that innocent people have been executed. Supporters say those who kill deserve to be killed, and that those killers who are executed can never kill again.

A Florida study by the Miami Herald newspaper found that it cost the state as much as $4 million to execute a convicted killer, but cost only about half a million dollars to imprison a killer for 40 years.

The state of Illinois is under a moratorium on executions, ordered by the state's Governor after evidence surfaced that more than a few of those who had been executed in recent years in that state may have been innocent.

A 1997 survey by the New York State Bar Association found that districts attorney across New York State had no uniform method of determining whether to seek the death penalty in a particular case. The Bar Association is a trade association for lawyers, most of whom are defense lawyers.

The death penalty -- carried out by means of a lethal injection of drugs -- is available to prosecutors in New York State who can charge a defendant with first degree murder, as long as one of ten "aggravating circumstances" are present. The condemned person must be older than 18 in order to be sentenced to death, and must not be mentally retarded.