Holding a gold Cross pen, Governor Pataki steadied and signed his first name to the document. His last name, signed with a black ballpoint pen, came next. With the stoke of these two pens, each belonging to a New York City police officer slain the previous year in separate circumstances, the newly inaugurated governor restored the death penalty to New York State on March 7, 1995, nearly 10 years ago today.

On March 15, 1994, one year prior almost to the day, Police Officer Sean McDonald, the gold Cross pen in the pocket of his uniform shirt, was shot and killed when he interrupted a robbery at a tailor’s shop in the Bronx. Officer Raymond Cannon was carrying the black ballpoint pen when he was shot and killed on December 2, 1994, during the robbery of a bicycle shop in Canarsie, Brooklyn.

“Our state has traveled an arduous road to arrive at this point in history,” Mr. Pataki intoned solemnly from the State Capital Building in Albany in remarks delivered after the signing. The law would actually take effect on September 1, 1995.

The last execution in New York State was in 1963. Although no one has been convicted and sentenced in a capital case under the new law signed in 1995, this past June the New York State Court of Appeals declared a major element of it unconstitutional.

Opponents of capital punishment have come out in force against the measure and the state Legislature is dragging its feet to rectify the law.

Once again, we find ourselves traveling an arduous road.

It seems so long ago since the time that murder had become a way of life in New York City. “The Rotting of the Big Apple” headline describing the city on the cover of Time Magazine in 1990 was more affirmation than information. A record 2,245 murders were reported in the city that year alone. By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the crime epidemic had ravaged many urban centers. New York, never to be on the wrong side of a trend, seemed to lead the way.

But New Yorkers were not only dissatisfied with the seismic changes that had overcome their lives with the infestation of drug dealers and violent felons; they wanted to do something about it. In an era when crime was on the doorsteps of the citizens of this state, three quarters of the electorate supported the death penalty, an issue which then candidate Pataki championed during the race against the incumbent, Governor Mario Cuomo.

Today, we seem to have forgotten. Newspapers chronicle the decade-long decline in criminal activity and we praise our police, in words more than in deeds, for a murder rate not seen since the days of President Kennedy and Camelot. The city has become a destination spot for tourists around the world, a meeting place for Republicans in the climate of a political season, and a serious contender for the Olympics in 2012. The crime-time of 10 and 15 years ago is today more often the setting of a lukewarm novel, motion picture, or short-lived TV drama than reality.

To believe, however, that we have overcome the challenges faced by law enforcement and that crime has been eradicated from the lexicon of the city would be a recipe for disaster. Police officers, judges, and district attorneys, among others, are all a part of the protection afforded by the death penalty. These essential parts of the criminal justice system, charged with the responsibility to protect order from chaos and the lawful from the lawless, merit the greatest protection that we as a civil society can afford.

In March 2003, two NYPD detectives performing one of the most dangerous jobs in policing were shot and killed execution-style while working undercover to get guns off city streets. In order to prosecute the alleged murderers of Detectives Rodney J. Andrews and James V. Nemorin and receive the penalty that such a heinous crime cries out for, the federal government has taken over the case.

Where is the outrage toward our local government that a city and a state must look to the feds to protect its own? Does it seem fair to demand the greatest sacrifice from the civil servants charged with our protection and then fail to protect them properly in return?

When a police officer is killed in the line of duty, friends and colleagues know that through the loss they are protected from above. Though nothing can replace the departed taken before their time, we are left to find the morsel of good in the wake of incredible tragedy.

The signing of the death penalty with the pens belonging to a pair of New York’s Finest that had never met each other was recognition that even in death they watch over us all. We still miss Sean McDonald and Raymond Cannon, James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews. The service they rendered and the sacrifice they gave is committed to the memory of not only those who knew them well but those whom they had never met.

Mr. Coll is a New York Police Department detective assigned to the Emergency Service Unit.