The super majorities held by Democrats in the state House and Senate have emboldened those majorities to enact legislation that has been left unaddressed in recent years. None is bigger than the historic vote to abolish the death penalty.
The bill cleared both chambers after long debate and was predictably vetoed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who has always supported the death penalty. One of the first tests of Rell’s administration involved whether to intervene to stop the execution of serial killer Michael Ross after he dropped all his appeals. She declined.
The veto is another lost opportunity because the cruel fact of Connecticut’s death penalty law is that it was written as the ultimate compromise between politicians who believe in capital punishment and others who did not, but understood the political benefits of appearing to be tough on crime. In other words, the law is a political hoax.
The late Richard Tulisano, the former long time chairman of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee who had a major hand in writing the law, was fond of explaining how Connecticut’s death penalty was designed to make execution nearly impossible. In fact, the only execution that has taken place in Connecticut was Ross’s death by lethal injection that came after he aggressively advocated for his own execution.
At the heart of the dysfunctional law was its original requirement that even one mitigating factor in favor of the defendant requires the judge to hand down a sentence of life in prison. In 1995, pro-death penalty forces pushed through a change allowing for the weighing of aggravating and mitigating factors. It has had no impact on the number of executions in Connecticut. Even if a defendant commits a crime so heinous that he ends up on death row, the appeals process has been used to indefinitely delay the carrying out of the sentence.
Most public opinion polls show people are philosophically in favor of capital punishment. But the questions put by public opinion surveys are so simplistic they are meaningless. Of course most people are in favor of eye-for-an-eye justice just as certainly as they favor spending cuts as opposed to tax increases. Public opinion polls on the death penalty ignore the real life and societal questions that come forward through the course of a trial.
As a reporter, I covered two death penalty cases from beginning to end. One was the Ross case and the other was the case of Jerry Daniels, a Norwich man convicted of brutally stabbing to death a woman and her three-year-old daughter. Listening to the testimony in each case, I came to the difficult conclusion that both men suffered from different degrees of mental illness. Their minds were so twisted that it was difficult to apply standard criminal motives to their behavior.
Gov. Rell’s veto hangs mainly on the argument that the death penalty is a deterrent, even though she acknowledges it is difficult to prove. The governor’s argument does not dispute that the death penalty did not keep Connecticut’s death row inmates from killing, but suggests there is a group of would-be killers out there who backed down after considering the consequences. Then wouldn’t the potential for a life sentence have the same effect?
Connecticut’s death penalty is a political masterpiece. It’s is all things to all politicians. The only constituents left with nothing to show for are the survivors of crime victims who never see justice. This year the legislature took a first step toward ending the charade.
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Dean Pagani is a former gubernatorial advisor. He is vice president of public affairs for Cashman and Katz Integrated Communications in Glastonbury.
