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Thread: Connecticut Capital Punishment News

  1. #21
    Banned TheKindExecutioner's Avatar
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    Horrible news.

    Hopefully by some miracle they can save the DP.

  2. #22
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    On the other hand,I seriously hope the US state of Connecticut becomes the 17th state to abolish capital punishment in the USA...besides, life imprisonment without parole (called a whole life term in Britain) is more of a punishment to those convicted of brutal murders than the death sentence in my opinion, less expensive in the long term, means that prisoners on such terms cannot dodge it (with the death sentence, death row inmates can get out quickly by volunteering to be executed by the state) and will also increase the chances of exoneration of wrongly convicted prisoners.

  3. #23
    Senior Member Member Slayer's Avatar
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    Your thoughts Heidi?

  4. #24
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Slayer View Post
    Your thoughts Heidi?
    I think it should have been a voter referendum.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  5. #25
    Senior Member Member Slayer's Avatar
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    Thanks Heidi you are one of the few people who can make sense of things for me!

  6. #26
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    I would have been bothered by the vote had it called for the current death row inmates sentences to be commuted to LWOP sentences.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  7. #27
    Banned TheKindExecutioner's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Heidi View Post
    I would have been bothered by the vote had it called for the current death row inmates sentences to be commuted to LWOP sentences.
    But if the ban goes through the anti-DP Nuts will next try and get death row inmates to LWOP!

    Sickening!

  8. #28
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Why they switched their votes on the death penalty

    Visits to Connecticut prisons, the death of loved ones and even random conversations on a train platform informed and tempered the 10-and-a-half-hour debate that led to the state Senate's historic vote early Thursday to end the death penalty.

    Sen. Carlo Leone, D-Stamford, traced his personal evolution to a recent trip to the Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, where the 11 men facing execution are housed under grim super-max conditions on death row.

    For Sen. Joseph J. Crisco Jr., D-Woodbridge, the tragic loss of a young grandson hit home with the finality of death, repelling him from voting to retain the death penalty, which he supported in 2009.

    Another who voted to keep capital punishment in 2009 was Sen. Gayle S. Slossberg, D-Milford. She said that soul-searching and a casual encounter with an elderly man while waiting for a Metro-North commuter train shifted her to the opposition.

    Those three votes, along with Sen. Edith G. Prague, D-Columbia, who helped kill a repeal bill last year, were the keys to the successful 20-15 passage of what might be the highest-profile legislation of the 2012 session.

    In 2009, it passed the House 90-56 and the Senate 19-17 before then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell's veto, which went unchallenged.

    Now, the bill, with added assurances that it would not affect those on death row, is headed for easy passage next week in the House of Representatives. It will then go to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a former criminal prosecutor who opposes capital punishment, for his signature.

    Leone voted against repeal as a member of the House in 2009. He said the visit to Northern C.I. was eye-opening and helped change his perspective in support of a new classification of murder under "special circumstances." That designation would put the most dangerous, depraved murderers in prison until their natural deaths.

    "Life without possibility of release, in essence, is life on death row," Leone said during the debate. "They will be in a more restrictive area with less privileges than those on death row."

    He said that with the exception of the one execution of an inmate since 1960 -- serial killer Michael Ross, who gave up court challenges in 2005 rather than linger in prison -- Connecticut's death penalty is impotent.

    "The appeals are endless," Leone said. "Forty-50 years: Only one? That's the part I was struggling with. Because emotionally, people who commit heinous crimes, crazy crimes, they should be executed, but we can't seem to do it. If you do try to make it workable then you have constitutionality issues that come into play. So by having the bill as amended, with the harsher reality (that) if you're going to be in prison for the rest of your life, the key thrown away, you will die in prison -- period -- is a pretty harsh sentence."

    Slossberg said that while waiting for a train to New York she sat next to an elderly man. They chatted and he eventually told her something that has lingered.

    "He said that between the tough economy, the rise of hate crimes, the vilification of this group or that group by otherwise good, moral people and the seemingly chronic need to blame somebody for society's problems, he said he was afraid, not for himself, but for our children," Slossberg recalled for the silent Senate chamber.

    "It is only a short step from here to there, he said, to think of some people as less than human. And once we think of people as less than human, it becomes easy to kill them, and then what kind of society do we really have?" Slossberg said. "That's really the question of today's debate: What kind of society do we have, and what kind of society do we want for our children. I want something better for our future. We cannot confront darkness with darkness and expect light."

    Crisco recalled the death of his namesake grandson, Joseph J. Crisco IV of Rhode Island, who died from chronic ailments at age 12 in 2009, as so shattering for him and his wife that he began changing his opinion on capital punishment.

    "And it's not a day or week goes by where you don't think about that loss," Crisco said, adding that the feeling helped him to empathize when he met with families of murder victims who were working for repeal of the death penalty because of the prolonged appeals processes.

    "I understood that even though the bill as written could bring closure, there is never closure when you lose a loved one because my wife and I think of our grandson Joseph just about every day," Crisco said.

    "In speaking to bishops and rabbis and priests and ministers and other people I became in my mind educated in regards for us as a society," Crisco said, also recalling a recent visit to Northern C.I. with other senators.

    "To me, that is hell on Earth," Crisco said. "How one retains one's sanity in an environment like that is incomprehensible."

    Prague voted to repeal executions in 2009. Last year, after meeting with Dr. William Petit, whose wife and two daughters were murdered during the infamous 2007 Cheshire home invasion, she felt like she had to oppose the repeal bill that died in the Senate.

    "I wasn't about to cause him any more problems," Prague said.

    But this year she met James Tillman, who was exonerated a couple of years ago, through DNA evidence, after spending 18 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit.

    "I don't want to be part of a system that sends innocent people to prison or innocent people to the death penalty," Prague said.

    When Connecticut joins the 16 other states and the District of Columbia that have abolished executions, it will make New Hampshire the last New England state to retain capital punishment.

    Read more: http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/...#ixzz1rFjPHUmx
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  9. #29
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    House begins debate on abolishing the death penalty

    The state House of Representatives started debate this afternoon on legislation that would end the death penalty in Connecticut.

    The bill, which cleared the Senate last week on a 20 to 16 vote, calls for abolishing the death penalty for future convictions, but not for the 11 inmates currently on the state's death row. It would substitute life imprisonment without the possibility of release for the death penalty.

    The repeal legislation is expected to pass tonight, despite anticipated "nay" votes from Rep. Ernest Hewett, D-New London and Rep. Steve Mikutel, D-Griswold.

    http://www.theday.com/article/201204...death-penalty-
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  10. #30
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    State House adopts Senate repeal legislation

    The state House of Representatives on Wednesday afternoon quickly adopted the Senate's legislation that would repeal the death penalty, and then rejected the first Republican amendment in an 88-54 test vote.

    The amendment, the first in a series Republicans are expected to offer, would have mandated that if the repeal was challenged and a court upheld the challenge, the state would revert back to the former death penalty statute.

    For many, the repeal is a victory.

    Fernando Bermudez of Danbury, who spent 18 years in prison for a 1991 murder that he did not commit in New York City, said the repeal would mean that wrongly accused people in the future may not face execution.

    "I am here today as a living testament to the imperfections of our criminal justice system," Bermudez said during a morning news conference in the Capitol complex. "The innocent have been executed."

    After 11 appeals, Bermudez was freed in 2010. Last year he filed a $40 million lawsuit against New York. "Eleven appeals in which prosecutorial misconduct, injurious testimony and bad identification procedures ruined my life, in certain instances, and today has left me with the stamp of post traumatic distress disorder," he said.

    For Dawn Mancarella, whose mother Joyce Masury, of Milford, was murdered in 1996, says abolishing capital punishment is something her mother would have wanted.

    "My experience with the criminal justice system taught me that the death penalty does not help victims' families," said Mancarella of Milford, a member of the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty." The death penalty does not help us. We stand her united to call for repeal."

    Noting that her mother's murder was not a capital felony case, Mancarella said that some CNADP members believe that the cases involving their loved ones get very little attention compared to the high-profile cases involving death penalty verdicts.

    "Some of us have endured capital cases and are horrified that the death penalty ensnares them in a never-ending wait for execution," she said. "In the meantime, the offender is made a celebrity and the victims' families are forced to wait decades for an execution that in Connecticut will likely never come. Some of us are frustrated that we spend millions of dollars to keep a death penalty instead of investing in effective crime-prevention tools and ongoing support for those victims' families in Connecticut who are in the throes of grief. Some of us don't believe that the death penalty brings closure or justice. These are elusive terms that cannot compete with the violent, horrific loss of a murdered loved one. Nor will they bring that loved one back to us."

    Read more: http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/...#ixzz1rlDfDwpM
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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