Connecticut Superior Court Judge Stanley T. Fuger ruled on February 27 that a suit alleging racial and geographic bias in the state’s death penalty should not be dismissed. Judge Fuger is allowing the claim from seven death row inmates to continue because the state’s constitution gives defendants greater legal rights than the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court had rejected a similar claim about Georgia’s death penalty in 1987 based on federal constitutional grounds.

In his ruling on a motion to dismiss from the state, Judge Fuger wrote:

In the instant case, the petitioners allege that they are to be deprived of their lives in a proceeding that has been tainted by the imposition of improper racial determinations. The stakes are, therefore, extraordinarily high for these petitioners and merit the closest of scrutiny before throwing the complaint out of court without any opportunity to provide the validity of the claims.

David Baldus, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law whose research on racial and geographic bias in the death penalty was the subject of the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, told the Hartford Courant, “Connecticut is not closing its eyes to this claim as most state courts have done. So that’s why this is an unusual case. Unusual and important.”

The Connecticut claim is based on a study by Yale Law School Professor John Donohue finding that the capital punishment system is arbitrary and capricious; non-white defendants are treated more harshly than white defendants, especially in cases with white victims. The heinousness of the underlying murders seems to play a minor role in determining who is sentenced to death, both within and across judicial districts.
(“Death Penalty May Be Tested,” by Katie Malone, The Hartford Courant, February 28, 2008). See Race and Arbitrariness.