Crime & Punishment : The death penalty is probably the most stark of moral dilemmas. The stories of two men--one a repeat rapist turned killer, the other a man wrongly accused--show the inequities justice must balance.

New York has become the latest state to legislate a blood desire that apparently most Americans have.

The new governor, George Pataki, signed a death penalty bill last month, making this the 38th state to have capital punishment. By fulfilling a campaign promise, the Republican governor also reversed 18 years of Democratic governors, who repeatedly vetoed similar legislation.

But as effectively as Pataki helped New York fall in line with the rest of the nation, it is never simple to force big moral issues into a narrow pipeline: There is always noisy debate, dramatic protests and quieter soul-searching among legislators. In fact, the death penalty is probably the most stark of moral dilemmas for an elected official accustomed to levying taxes and cleaning streets because it asks government, in a country where individual rights are so central, to take individual life.

What haunts lawmakers after these decisions is not necessarily the last-minute shrieks of the executed. (Who can forget the cry of “I’m human, I’m human, don’t kill me!” from a North Carolina murderer before a hood was pulled over his head?) Nor are the politicians always troubled by the possibility of a slip-up that would allow an innocent person to die.

Rather, for most, the faces that will not fade are those of the other dead--the thousands who are slaughtered year in and year out in America by cold-blooded killers.

For 17 years as a member of the New York State Legislature--first as an assemblyman and now a senator--Kemp Hannon hopelessly cast a vote for capital punishment. Each time, his cause was rejected by Gov. Hugh Carey, then Mario Cuomo. Still, as a GOP floor leader in the Assembly, he encouraged his opponents--who he knew would win the day--to engage in full-fledged debate.

“I wanted to make sure that any new person would hear all the stories and arguments on both sides,” Hannon says. “I always wanted my vote to be a real vote.”

Throughout those years Hannon felt different moral tugs as he cast his vote. “I looked at this issue from a general philosophical point of view, from theories of criminal law and through questions of Catholic teachings,” says Hannon, a lawyer and a Catholic. This year, though, he could look at it only from the point of view of six men and women who were gunned down on the Long Island Railroad by Colin Ferguson. The victims lived in Hannon’s Long Island district.

“When you have the most heinous of crimes you ought to have the severest of penalty,” he says. “That’s about justice.”

The following stories are of two men who might have landed in a death house if they had been convicted of murder in New York before capital punishment became the law of the state.

One killer was devilishly guilty; the other innocent. One was so dark and deviant that in a poem he wrote about himself he said he deserved to live out his days behind bars. The other, though imperfect, longed for his life back in society and that is where he remains.

Scott Geddes

Scott Geddes, stocky and chipmunk-cheeked, always tied his victims’ wrists. That was his way. Sometimes he tied them with wire, sometimes with shoelaces, but always he bound before he sexually invaded and, in the case of Susan Anderson, murdered.

Shortly after his 16th birthday on Halloween, 1981, Geddes began his resume of brutalizing women and girls he picked at random, according to a portrait of him drawn from police and court records, prosecutors and victims’ families.

His first victim was 10 then. She was on her way to the grocery store in the upstate city of Plattsburg to buy potatoes for dinner when Geddes dragged her into a wooded cemetery, where he whipped her with a stick, made her strip at knifepoint, tied her wrists with wire and then proceeded to stick his fingers into her vagina. She miraculously escaped and Geddes was imprisoned for four years.

Released in November, 1985, he was back behind bars by December for another two years on robbery charges. A month after he got out, he raped again, this time a woman outside a convenience store on Long Island. As she pulled out of the parking lot, Geddes jumped into the front seat of her car and threatened to kill her if she didn’t cooperate. By the time he was done beating and sexually molesting her, she needed 30 stitches above her right eye, her brain was swollen, and her face and head were bruised and bloody. This victim amazingly persuaded Geddes--who apparently cried at times while he was attacking her--to let her go.

Later, police found his shoelaces near her car.

For that incident, Geddes served less than two years in prison; within seven months of his release, he was again beating and raping under the cover of evening, and trees and bushes. With each attack he became more vicious, more sexually violent, leaving bigger pools of blood and more broken bones, according to police records.

In addition to being raped and sodomized, his third victim was punched, choked, kicked and beaten with a brick; he inserted his fist in her mouth, dislodging several of her teeth, and stomped on her stomach when she told him she was pregnant. After three years and six months in prison--the sentence was lighter than usual because this victim, an alcoholic, was drunk during the attack--Geddes left prison and made his way back to his hometown of Plattsburg.

This time his rage was quiet only 18 days.

On Nov. 23, 1993, at about 11 p.m., Geddes stopped by Pappy Jack’s, a friendly neighborhood bar. It was a Monday night, which meant Susan Anderson was bartending, a once-a-week gig that earned her extra money but more importantly allowed her to be out among people. Anderson, the mother of Ashley, 11, Paul, 9, and Kristen, 7, also ran a child-care center out of her house a few miles from Pappy Jack’s while her own kids were in school. But Monday nights her husband, a steam pipe fitter, watched the kids. Now, he is in charge every night.

Geddes apparently lurked outside the bar as Anderson closed up for the evening. He may have jumped her as she got into her car, the police suggested. Later they found her car, the back seat soaked with blood, less than a mile up the road near Scomotion Creek. They found Susan Anderson’s body floating face down in the creek. She was naked below the waist; she had been raped, stabbed seven times--including once right through the cheek--and her left nipple had been bitten off. There was also evidence that she had been forced--bleeding and with a knife prodding her in the back--to walk to her death with her hands tied behind her back.

Scott Geddes’ red shoelaces were binding her wrists.

During an eight-week trial that began on his Halloween birthday, 1994, Geddes represented himself. Throughout, he insisted that someone else must have killed Anderson, although no evidence supported his story. He also made many other claims about his scarred past that seemed more likely to be true.

Before the trial, the local newspaper ran a poem by Geddes in which he wrote that at the age of 5 he had been sexually abused. Titled “The Boy, the Monster, the Man,” the poem began: “If you take and break a boy’s toys, you’ve only stolen some of his joys. But take that boy, beat and rape him and I tell you now: a monster you will shape him.”

Geddes said his abusers were in his own family, and he took particular pleasure during the trial in humiliating his mother and sister on the stand after they both testified that he had tearfully confessed the murder to them during separate jailhouse visits. During hours of questioning, Geddes tried to get his mother to admit that he had been sexually abused as a child not only by her but by an uncle and a brother.

Geddes was convicted and sentenced to three consecutive 25-years-to-life terms in prison. As he was taken away in shackles, he stuck his tongue out at Susan Anderson’s relatives.

Two years after Susan’s death, the Andersons are still trying to recover. Her husband, Steve, simply can’t speak of her murder--not to his parents, not to anybody. Her son, Paul, now 11, has had the most difficulty coping without his mom, according to family. Her father, whose wife had died of cancer when Susan was 18, couldn’t even attend the trial; he was too emotional. And Tom Anderson, her father-in-law and a retired corrections officer, only wishes New York State had legalized the death penalty before Susan’s murder.

“At least Geddes would have gotten it,” he says.

Geddes could not be reached for comment.

Clinton County Dist. Atty. Penelope Clute says she surely would have asked for Geddes to die by lethal injection if New York had allowed it then.

“To say he deserves the death penalty is not to say everybody who kills in the course of a rape deserves it,” Clute says. “But he is an extreme category. The death penalty wouldn’t have deterred him from raping over and over again, but when you see what he did, you realize he deserves the ultimate punishment.”

EDDIE ANDRE

Every now and then Eddie Andre goes to his house in Queens in the middle of the day, aims the video camera at his angular and mustached face, and presses the “record” button.

“This is Eddie,” he tells the camera. “I’m home right now and it’s this time and day and I’m not killing anybody.”

This may seem a strange habit, but Eddie Andre had six years in prison to develop a very special type of paranoia. He was put away for that long for a murder he did not commit.

Ultimately, Andre’s mother, Rolande--in a “Murder, She Wrote”-type plot twist--helped gather information that lead to charges against her son being dropped.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately since they passed the death penalty,” Andre says. “Six years would have been more than enough time to kill me before they found out I was innocent.”

But in fact, Eddie Andre, 50, was not an “innocent” youth.

Born in Haiti, he arrived in New York when he was 10 months old and grew up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Queens. Until he was about 30, Andre was in and out of prison. He stole a car; he snatched a pocketbook. There were petty larceny charges and grand larceny charges.

And, he was convicted of manslaughter.

He was 22 at the time and a gang called the Whiz Kids robbed his mother’s house as revenge for something Andre’s cousin had done. With friends, Andre went looking for the culprits, found two, and held them at gunpoint in his mother’s basement.

“I was talking to them, getting the straight story of why they robbed us, and the gun went off and blew this guy’s heart out,” Andre says. The “guy” was 16 years old.

“I immediately went and gave myself up,” Andre adds, “and showed them where the gun was. That’s how it really happened. I didn’t want to kill nobody.”

He served 4 1/2 years in prison for the homicide. And then he wound up back in prison a year later for violating parole.

But Andre says he began settling down by 1976. He went back to school, worked jobs and got into only a few scrapes.

Then on June 3, 1986, he was home in a big chair watching the basketball championships with a young friend from the neighborhood when police knocked on his door saying they were looking for someone named Jose.

“It was a ruse to get me out of the apartment,” he says. “In minutes they put a gun on my head. And that was the beginning of my six-year nightmare.”

A couple of miles away in a drug dealer’s haven called “the 40 projects” in South Jamaica, Queens, a social worker named Steve Shields had been gunned down in a courtyard of crackheads. Yvonne Hall was chasing a friend who had pulled her hair when she passed the body. Later she was brought in as a witness and police asked her to look through old books of pictures of people accused in homicides. Apparently when she saw Andre’s picture from 20 years earlier, she gasped. (Andre insists today that she reacted that way because he looks a lot like the victim.) Yvonne told police Andre was the murderer. Another teen-ager, James Robinson, also identified him.

But Rolande Andre, Eddie’s then-64-year-old mother, didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe her son would coldly gun someone down. She had seen him growing in the last 10 years, she says.

Andre’s first trial ended in a hung jury with 11 jurors voting for acquittal. But one, a Russian immigrant who said he assumed that if the state arrested someone he was guilty, voted against acquittal.

Andre rejected a plea-bargain deal in which he could have gotten out of jail with the time he had already served.

“It may sound crazy,” Andre says now, “but I knew this time I didn’t do it. If I had I would have taken the plea, just to get back on the street. But I didn’t do it.”

In a second trial, Andre was found guilty of second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon. The conviction was based mostly on the testimony of then-14-year-old Yvonne Hall. James Robinson had already recanted his identification of Andre.

After the first trial, Rolande Andre began her own investigation of the murder by hunting for Yvonne and Robinson to question them about seeing her son at the murder scene.

“When I asked Eddie, he said, ‘Mommy, I didn’t kill nobody.’ That’s all I wanted to hear and I started investigating.”

Rolande Andre, a tailor at a dry cleaners, started trawling the Queens housing projects. She talked to dozens of people in looking for the witnesses; she also showed people pictures of her son to calm a nagging doubt in her mind that maybe Eddie really did frequent that neighborhood. But nobody recognized him.

“I was out there on the streets at night and it was very scary,” she says. “But there was no other way.”

Finally she found Yvonne Hall, and with the teen-ager’s grandmother sitting nearby, the girl admitted that she had no idea if Eddie Andre was the murderer.

“Her grandmother said, ‘How do you do something like that, girl? You put a man in jail you didn’t see and you don’t know?’ ”

Shortly after Hall signed a statement recanting the identification, she changed her story in court again and said Eddie Andre was the killer.

Ultimately, the State Appellate Division reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial; later, the Queens district attorney dismissed the charges against Andre--eight years after he was arrested--because Hall was not ready to go back on the stand and finger him.

Today, Andre is working on a community newspaper and in programs with former prisoners. He is playing music with groups and he is watching out for his mother. He is also suing the state, claiming that he was unfairly imprisoned. But mostly Eddie Andre is being careful.

“I document everything I do,” he says. “I put everything on paper and save phone bills, anything that records where I am”