The "Enquiries" of Rush and Bradford and the Pennsylvania movement toward abolition of the death penalty had a little immediate impact on the practices of other States. But in the early 1800s, Governors George and DeWitt Clinton and Daniel Tompkins unsuccessfully urged the New York Legislature to modify or end capital punishment. 

During this same period, Edward Livingston, an American lawyer who later became Secretary of State and Minister to France under President Andrew Jackson, was appointed by the Louisiana Legislature to draft a new penal code. At the center of his proposal was "the total abolition of capital punishment." His Introductory Report to the System of Penal Law Prepared for the State of Louisiana contained a systematic rebuttal of all arguments favoring capital punishment.

Drafted in 1824, it was not published until 1833. This work was a tremendous impetus to the abolition movement for the next half-century. In 1821, by appointment of the legislature, of which he had become a member in the preceding year, Livingston began the preparation of a new code of criminal law and procedure, afterward known in Europe and America as the "Livingston Code".

It was prepared in both French and English, as was required by the necessities of practice in Louisiana, and actually consisted of four sections: crimes and punishments, procedure, evidence in criminal cases, reform and prison discipline. Though substantially completed in 1824, when it was accidentally burned, and again in 1826, it was not printed in its entirety until 1833.

It was never adopted by the state. It was at once reprinted in England, France and Germany, attracting wide praise by its remarkable simplicity and vigor, and especially by reason of its philanthropic provisions in the code of reform and prison discipline, which noticeably influenced the penal legislation of various countries. "American criminal codes were first compiled by Edward Livingston. Livingston’s elaborate drafts for a federal criminal code and a Louisiana criminal code, completed in 1826, were both the most ambitious and the least successful efforts at criminal law codification in the United States. Livingston’s Penal Code was Benthamite both in scope and in substance. 

The Penal Code was divided into four separate codes comprising all aspects of penal law, from the definition of penal norms in a Code of Crimes and Punishments, to the imposition of those norms in a Code of Procedure and a Code of Evidence, and eventually to the actual infliction of sanctions in a Code of Reform and Prison Discipline. 

Each aspect of the penal law, and each corresponding code, were individually, and as a system, designed to rationalize penal law on the utilitarian principle that Bentham had derived from Cesare Beccaria’s famous treatise on Crimes and Punishments: la massima felicita divisa nel maggior numero". Livingston's code was originally published piecemeal in Louisiana during the 1820s, many of the component parts in their original printings are now virtually unobtainable.