AP Photo/Jessica Hill
Bishop Laura Ahrens, left, and Bishop Ian Douglas, right, rally at the state Capitol with religious leaders who oppose the death penalty in Hartford, Conn., on Tuesday, April 3, 2012.
By Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com
Despite widespread public opposition, Connecticut may become the next state to abolish the death penalty, with lawmakers taking up the vote Wednesday.
Legislative action was delayed last year amid the high-profile prosecution of a capital punishment case involving a brutal home invasion that left a mother and her two daughters dead. But now
the Senate is set to vote on legislation that would replace the death penalty with life without parole.
The bill would then head to the House of Representatives, where observers expect it to pass. Gov. Daniel Malloy said he would sign the bill as long as it was forward looking, and not retroactive to those already sitting on death row.
Senate leadership held a press conference at the Capitol Wednesday to say they have the votes needed to secure passage, with some families of murder victims joining to support them, while Senate Republican opponents organized their own news conference.
Connecticut's ranking Senate Republican, John McKinney, told The Wall Street Journal that the bill would likely pass despite his and other's objections.
"I believe, and continue to believe, that there are some crimes so heinous and cruel that the death penalty is a just punishment," he said. He also held up Connecticut's law as one of the fairest in the country. "It provides significant protection for those on death row," he said.
A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that the state's voters are against repealing the death penalty by a margin of 62-31 percent.
"As we've seen in past Quinnipiac University polls, Connecticut voters still think abolishing the death penalty is a bad idea," said Douglas Schwartz, poll director.
If the legislation passes, Connecticut would be the fifth state in five years to repeal the death penalty, joining 16 others. In California, voters will decide in November whether to also do away with it.
“The upcoming Connecticut vote is in line with a clear trend away from the use of capital punishment across the country. As significant concerns about executing the innocent, the high cost of the death penalty and its unfair application continue to grow, more states are turning to alternative punishments,” Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), said in a statement.
A bill to repeal Connecticut's death penalty passed in 2009, but then Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed it. Last year, the bill made it through the joint House and Senate judiciary committee, but it died before a full Senate vote after a few senators withdrew their support because the trial of a second man charged in the Cheshire home invasion case was coming up, said Ben Jones, executive director of the Connecticut anti-death penalty group.
But it is now possible to have the death penalty debate not amid the “heated nature of a capital trial," so "people are able to think about it more at a systematic level,” said Shari Silberstein, executive director of Equal Justice USA.
Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes were convicted in the 2007 Cheshire killings of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11. The girls were tied to their beds and doused in gasoline before the house was set ablaze; they died of smoke inhalation; their mother was strangled.
George Ruhe / AP
Authorities outside the home of Dr. William Petit, a noted specialist in diabetes, in Cheshire, Conn., on Monday July 23, 2007. Intruders broke into his home, held the family hostage and killed his wife and two daughters.
The lone survivor of the invasion, Dr. William A. Petit Jr., along with his sister, Johanna Petit Chapman, oppose the repeal. In a statement given March 14 to the New Haven Register, they said: “We firmly believe that the death penalty is the appropriate sanction in certain heinous, cruel and depraved crimes.”
“There is no such thing as closure when your loved one is savagely taken from you,” their statement continued. “There is no such thing as a prospective repeal. Passage of this bill essentially voids the death sentences of those currently on death row.”
There are 11 inmates on Connecticut's death row. The state has carried out one execution since 1976. Connecticut’s Office of Fiscal Analysis estimated that the state spends $5 million a year on the death penalty system, according to the DPIC.
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