CONNECTICUT (USA): STATE SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS ABOLISHMENT OF DEATH PENALTY, INCLUDING FOR DEATH-ROW INMATES

May 26, 2016: The Connecticut Supreme Court has upheld 5-2 its 2015 decision to abolish the state’s death penalty, including for the 11 men on Connecticut’s death row.
The 11 would be re-sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release.
Chief State's Attorney Kevin T. Kane's announcement signaled a definitive end to prosecutors' fight to keep in place the death sentences of those on death row.
Legislators in 2012 repealed capital punishment with the caveat that those already sentenced to death could still face execution.
Thursday's Supreme Court ruling upholds the justices' 4-3 decision last August that the death penalty was unconstitutional for all, including those already sentenced before the repeal. After the repeal, attorneys for those on death row challenged the law in the case of Eduardo Santiago, arguing in an April 2013 hearing at the Supreme Court that the law, among other things, violated the condemned inmates' constitutional rights. Santiago had faced the death penalty for the December 2000 killing of Joseph Niwinski.
More than two years later, the justices issued their ruling in a contentious decision last August, the majority writing that executing an inmate "would violate the state constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment" and that the death penalty "no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency."
Prosecutors then filed briefs arguing for the Santiago decision to be overruled in the pending appeal of Russell Peeler, who was sentenced to death for ordering the 1999 killings of 8-year-old Leroy "B.J." Brown Jr. and his mother, Karen Clarke. The justices heard arguments on those briefs in January. Gov. Dannel Malloy, in a statement released Thursday afternoon, said the ruling "reaffirms what the court has already said: Those currently serving on death row will serve the rest of their life in prison with no possibility of ever obtaining freedom." Malloy noted what both sides of the death penalty debate have said for years — that it is rarely used. In nearly 60 years, Connecticut has executed only two inmates, serial killers Michael Ross in 2005 and Joseph "Mad Dog" Taborsky in 1960, both of whom volunteered for death. (Source: Hartford Courant, 26/05/2016)