CONNECTICUT IS to repeal the death penalty, becoming the 17th state of the United States and the fifth in five years to abolish capital punishment.
New Hampshire and Pennsylvania will now be the only states in the northeastern US that still have the death penalty. New Jersey repealed it in 2007. New York’s statute was ruled unconstitutional by the state’s highest court in 2004, and lawmakers have not moved to fix the law.
The vote by the Democratic Party-dominated Connecticut House of Representatives, after more than two decades of debate and the 2009 veto of a similar Bill by the Republican Party governor at the time, came against the backdrop of one of the state’s most horrific crimes: a 2007 home invasion in Cheshire in which Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Hayley (17), and Michaela (11), were held hostage and murdered, two of the three raped, and their house set on fire by two habitual criminals now on death row.
Ms Hawke-Petit’s husband, Dr William Petit, who was badly beaten but escaped, has since been an ardent advocate for keeping the death penalty.
The Bill exempts the 11 men currently on death row, including the men convicted of the Hawke-Petit murders.
Before that vote, Dr Petit spoke at a news conference where he called for the Senate not to pass the bill. “We believe in the death penalty because we believe it is really the only true, just punishment for certain heinous and depraved murders,” he said.
But the measure was approved by a vote of 86-62, largely along party lines. Thirteen proposed amendments that would have watered down the Bill were defeated during the debate, in which many legislators provided personal stories of the effects of violent crime.
State representative Patricia Widlitz, a Democrat, said that like many members she was torn over her vote. But she recalled a vicious murder in her community and the difficulty residents went through in explaining it to local children.
“I just couldn’t reconcile telling them that it’s OK for the government to kill after teaching them that killing is wrong, it’s unacceptable, it’s immoral,” Ms Widlitz said. – (New York Times service)
