Unconstitutional

Connecticut Death Penalty Law Is Unconstitutional, Court Rules

By BENJAMIN MUELLER and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

Casting the death penalty as an outdated tool of justice at odds with today’s societal values, Connecticut’s highest court on Thursday spared the lives of 11 men on death row by ruling that capital punishment violated the State Constitution.

The court ruled, 4 to 3, that a 2012 law abolishing capital punishment must be applied to the 11 inmates facing execution for offenses they committed before the measure took effect. But the decision went well beyond the narrow question of whether those men could be executed, declaring that the death penalty, in the modern age, met the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.

“We are persuaded that, following its prospective abolition, this state’s death penalty no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency and no longer serves any legitimate penological purpose,” Justice Richard Palmer of the State Supreme Court wrote for the majority.

In a blistering dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers said the majority’s decision overstated the societal aversion to the death penalty, calling the ruling “a house of cards, falling under the slightest breath of scrutiny.”

Opponents of the death penalty said the decision would quite likely influence high courts in other states, among them Colorado and Washington, where capital punishment has recently been challenged under the theory that society’s mores have evolved, transforming what was once an acceptable step into an unconstitutional punishment.

Though the ruling has no legal impact beyond Connecticut, the United States Supreme Court often uses such opinions as guides to determine whether societal views have shifted, experts on the death penalty said on Thursday. In the past, state court rulings on issues such as the legality of sodomy laws and the execution of mentally disabled people have paved the way for landmark Supreme Court rulings.

“This decision is just one more nail in the coffin of the death penalty,” said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University who specializes in death penalty cases. “If you have a strong trend in the states rejecting a practice, that influences the Supreme Court.”

Justice Palmer said that the 2012 state law abolishing the death penalty for people convicted of future crimes but permitting the execution of inmates who committed earlier crimes had already marked the “death knell” of a practice long out of step with moral feelings in the Northeast.

The court said it would be “cruel and unusual” to keep anyone on death row in a state that had “determined that the machinery of death is irreparable or, at the least, unbecoming to a civilized modern state.”

The decision went further still, saying the practice was ineffective, rarely imposed and tainted by “racial, ethnic and socio-economic biases.” Death penalty experts said that reasoning could be cited as a precedent in New Mexico, which kept two men on death row after abolishing capital punishment in 2009.

The ruling was seen by legal experts as the inevitable end to an emotional debate over the death penalty for Connecticut, which has executed only one inmate in the last 50 years. Intense political pressure that followed the grisly killing of a woman and her two daughters during a home invasion in 2007 in Cheshire moved the state to keep inmates on death row who had committed crimes before the 2012 law was enacted.

With its decision on Thursday, “the Supreme Court has brought this to its logical conclusion and made it a total abolition,” said Lawrence B. Goodheart, a history professor at the University of Connecticut whose study of the death penalty was cited by Justice Palmer.

The ruling, Professor Goodheart added, validated the political strategy employed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat who campaigned in 2010 on a platform of abolishing the death penalty but signed a more limited bill amid anger over the Cheshire case.

The ruling, which was met with outrage by the families of victims whose killers are on death row, came in response to an appeal by Eduardo Santiago. He was facing resentencing and the possibility of lethal injection for fatally shooting Joseph Niwinski in the head as he slept in West Hartford in 2000.

Mr. Niwinski’s brother, Francis Niwinski Jr., said he did not regard death as a cruel punishment for the convicted killer.

“He’s a worthless piece of garbage,” Mr. Niwinski said. “Now all of a sudden they change the laws when that court already sentenced him. That’s not justice. That’s unfair justice to us."

Marybelle Hawke, 93, whose daughter Jennifer Hawke-Petit was killed in the Cheshire murders, said the state had abandoned her family. “I just can’t begin to believe they would do that,” she said. “The death penalty represents for the general public the capability of doing something that would make life more fair.”

Connecticut is among 19 states that do not impose the death penalty. That number has grown in recent years as advocates argued that the punishment was costly and overwhelmingly applied to black and poor defendants.

Justice Palmer said that trend was even more pronounced in Connecticut, whose rate of executions was among the lowest in the country. Its execution in 2005 of Michael Ross, a convicted serial killer, came only after Mr. Ross voluntarily abandoned his right to appeal. Before that, the state had not killed an inmate since 1960, a history that legal experts said made it unlikely that any of the 11 men who remained on death row would have ever been put to death.

Connecticut officials said they were studying what steps would follow, but they expected the death sentences to revert to sentences of life without parole.

Citing “secularization, evolving moral standards, new constitutional and procedural protections, and the availability of incarceration as a viable alternative to execution,” the decision said public acceptance of the death penalty had eroded.

The decision also said the death penalty failed to serve a purpose in fighting crime, given that long delays in carrying out executions drained its value as a deterrent, and that racial biases and the possibility of error undermined its capacity to satisfy retribution.

The justices still had to grapple with why state lawmakers made exceptions for people already on death row when they did away with capital punishment three years ago. In her dissent, Chief Justice Rogers argued that “the reason for the prospective repeal was not that a majority of legislators found the death penalty morally repugnant even for the worst crimes.” Instead, she wrote, “they had determined that the death penalty simply had become impracticable.”

The majority rejected that reasoning, finding that the prospective repeal marked the logical endpoint of a “steady, inexorable devolution in the popularity and legitimacy of the death penalty.”

Justice Palmer wrote that while the 2012 law “reflects the intent of the legislature that capital punishment shall die with a whimper, not with a bang, its death knell has been rung nonetheless.”

The decision carried to completion Mr. Malloy’s politically risky position of standing by his promise to abolish the death penalty even as support for the practice — fueled by the killing of Ms. Hawke-Petit and her two daughters — was rising.

Abolition was politically unfeasible in 2012, Professor Goodheart said, but the governor’s decision to sign the more limited bill began a process that culminated in the ruling on Thursday.

In a statement released after the decision, Mr. Malloy reflected on the state’s long path from imposing the death penalty only rarely, to ending it.

“Today is a somber day, where our focus should not be on the 11 men sitting on death row but with their victims and those surviving families members,” he said. “My thoughts and prayers are with them during what must be a difficult day.”