 Despite the powerful and numerous appeals to spare Goode's life including an application by his counsel to commute his sentence, Governor George N. Briggs adamantly refused to commute Goode's death sentence.Goode's execution marked a turning point in the early 19th-century campaign to abolish the death penalty in Massachusetts.As no person had been hanged in Boston since 1836, those opposed to the death penalty thought this showed a shift in the public's attitude away from capital punishment.