On April 11, the Connecticut House of Representatives passed (86-62) a bill to abolish the death penalty for future crimes. The same bill passed the Connecticut Senate on April 5. Governor Dannel Malloy has pledged to sign the bill, which will make Connecticut the 17th state to abolish the death penalty, and the 5th to do so in the last 5 years. In a statement released after the House vote, Gov. Malloy said, "When I sign this bill, Connecticut will join 16 other states and almost every other industrialized nation in moving toward what I believe is better public policy." During the lengthy debate on the bill, legislators discussed issues of cost, deterrence, and innocence, as well as their moral convictions on the issue. Rep. Auden Grogins (D-Bridgeport) said, "The law is costly, can be arbitrarily applied and does not produce accurate results. It is not unusual for the legal process, from the beginning to the end, to take 20 years." Rep. Terry Backer (D-Stratford) voiced concerns about wrongful convictions, saying, "We have an imperfect system and there are many mistakes we make as government. Unfortunately, when we are wrong in these cases, there is no way to put them back on track."
On April 25, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy (pictured) signed into law a bill that replaces the death penalty with life without parole. Connecticut is the fifth state in five years, and the 17th overall, to do away with capital punishment. Governor Malloy, who once supported the death penalty, offered the following statement: “My position on the appropriateness of the death penalty in our criminal justice system evolved over a long period of time. As a young man, I was a death penalty supporter. Then I spent years as a prosecutor and pursued dangerous felons in court, including murderers. In the trenches of a criminal courtroom, I learned firsthand that our system of justice is very imperfect. While it’s a good system designed with the highest ideals of our democratic society in mind, like most of human experience, it is subject to the fallibility of those who participate in it. I saw people who were poorly served by their counsel. I saw people wrongly accused or mistakenly identified. I saw discrimination. In bearing witness to those things, I came to believe that doing away with the death penalty was the only way to ensure it would not be unfairly imposed." See more of the governor's statement below.
On April 23, the SAFE California Act, an initiative to replace California’s death penalty with a sentence of life without parole, qualified for the November 2012 ballot by presenting an ample number of qualified signatures. The initiative garnered almost 800,000 signatures for the measure that would repeal the death penalty and make capital crimes punishable by life in prison without parole. The initiative would also require inmates to work in prison to help pay restitution to the families of victims, and would send $30 million annually for three years to local law enforcement agencies to help solve murder and rape cases. Ron Briggs, who sponsored the 1978 initiative that expanded the death penalty in California, recently expressed support for repeal of the law. In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Briggs endorsed the SAFE California campaign, saying “I still believe that society must be protected from the most heinous criminals, and that they don't deserve to ever again be free. But I'd like to see them serve their terms with the general prison population, where they could be required to work and pay restitution into the victims' compensation fund. There are few 'do-overs' in life, especially in politics. With the death penalty, though, 34 years later I have an opportunity to set things right.”
On April 20, North Carolina Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks issued an historic ruling under the state's Racial Justice Act finding intentional bias by the state in selecting juries for death penalty cases. In what may be the first ruling of its kind in the country, the court held that “race was a materially, practically and statistically significant factor in the decision to exercise peremptory challenges during jury selection by prosecutors” at the time of Marcus Robinson’s (pictured) trial. Robinson’s death sentence was reduced to life without parole. Earlier this year, lawyers for Robinson presented statistical studies showing that race played an improper role in jury selection in capital cases across the state. The evidence included findings from a study conducted by law professors at Michigan State University that concluded that qualified black jurors were struck from juries at more than twice the rate of qualified white jurors in the state’s 173 capital cases between 1990-2010. Judge Weeks said that the disparity was strong enough “as to support an inference of intentional discrimination.” Many other North Carolina inmates have also challenged their death sentences on similar grounds.
A recent editorial in the New York Times called Connecticut's decision to repeal the death penalty part of "a growing movement against capital punishment." The editorial attributed the trend away from the death penalty to new research that shows "gross injustice in its application and enormous costs in continuing to impose it." The problem of arbitrariness recently came to light in Connecticut, where "a powerful, comprehensive study provided evidence that state death sentences are haphazardly meted out, with virtually no connection to the heinousness of the crime." The Times also cited racial bias, inadequate representation, and wrongful convictions as problems inherent to the death penalty, saying that "the system cannot be fixed. It is practically impossible to rid the legal process of biases driven by race, class and politics." Ultimately, the paper concluded, it would be better to abolish the death penalty entirely. Read the full editorial below.
Donald Heller (pictured), who wrote California's death penalty law, and Ron Briggs, who led the campaign to reinstate the law in 1978, are now advocating for replacing the death penalty with a sentence of life without parole. Both now say that the law did not have the result they intended. “At the time, we were of the impression that it would do swift justice, that it would get the criminals and murderers through the system quickly and apply them the death penalty,” Briggs said. But the costs of the death penalty system has led him to reconsider his stance: "I tell my Republican friends, ‘Close your eyes for a moment. If there was a state program that was costing $185 million a year and only gave the money to lawyers and criminals, what would you do with it?’" Donald Heller, a former prosecutor, called California's death penalty system a "colossal failure," also mentioning its high costs, “The cost of our system of capital punishment is so enormous that any benefit that could be obtained from it — and now I think there’s very little or zero benefit — is so dollar-wasteful that it serves no effective purpose." Both men are supporting a November ballot initiative that would replace death sentences with life without parole and use the money saved to solve cold cases. California has not carried out an execution in six years, and has about 720 inmates on death row.