Connecticut votes to abolish death penalty

Connecticut’s state senate voted Thursday to abolish the death penalty, Reuters reported. The state was the last in New England to utilize the death penalty since it was reinstated in 1976; it broke a 45-year hiatus and executed Michael Ross in 2005.

The Hartford Courant wrote that the state Senate, which was the biggest hurdle to passing the bill, debated for 10 hours before calling a vote early Thursday morning. 

The vote was 20 to 16, and the House of Representative is expected to easily pass the bill. Governor Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat, has promised to sign the ban into law. The Democratic governor campaigned on a platform that included abolishing the death penalty, despite public support for capital punishment following a sensational murder in Cheshire, The New York Times reported.

CNN wrote that if Connecticut passes the law, it will become "the fifth in five years to abolish capital punishment" and the seventeenth state in the country. A 2009 bill abolishing the death penalty was vetoed by former Republican Governor M. Jodi Rell.

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Senator Gayle Slossberg, Democrat from Milford, said in a speech explaining her shift from being a death penalty supporter to an opponent, "Benjamin Franklin said '… it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer.' The good news is that by eliminating the death penalty, we are not letting any guilty person go free, but we are making sure that we do not execute someone who is innocent."

Slossberg also noted that capital punishment does not serve as an effective deterrant to crime: "The South implements 80 percent of all executions in the country and has the highest murder rate, whereas, the Northeast implements less than 1 percent of all the executions and has the lowest murder rate in the nation," she said. 

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The ban would be "prospective," according to Reuters, which means it would not commute the sentences of the 11 men awaiting death in the state's Death Row.

New York, New Mexico, Illinois, and New Jersey have all ended the death penalty in recent years. Other states have indiciated interest in either limiting or abolishing capital punishment.

According to a fact sheet from the Death Penalty Information Center, executions in the US peaked in 1999, with 98 people killed. The number has shrunk since then; 43 were executed in 2011. 

"I disagree with those of you who believe that the death penalty is the ultimate punishment," said New Haven Democrat Toni Harp, referring to the 2005 execution of Michael Ross. Ross could have avoided execution had he chosen to continue endless, costly legal appeals.

"Death is something that is the common denominator, it is something we all face in our lives one way or another," she said. "In contrast, life on death row was so bleak, Ross sought death as a remedy," the Courant wrote.