On August 13, 2015, the Connecticut Supreme Court (4-3) held that the state's death penalty was in violation of the state's constitution, especially in light of the state legislature's prospective repeal of the death penalty in 2012. The ruling means that the death sentences of those who were not covered by the legislative repeal will now have those sentences reduced to life. Excerpts from the main opinion follow:
"[W]e 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."
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‘‘'[W]e have little more than an illusion of a death penalty in this country. ... Whatever purposes the death penalty is said to serve— deterrence, retribution, assuaging the pain suffered by victims’ families—these purposes are not served by the system as it now operates.'" (quoting Judge Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Cir.)
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"In concluding that the death pen- alty is unconstitutional, however, we recognize that the legal and moral legitimacy of any future executions would be undermined by the ever present risk that an innocent person will be wrongly executed."
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"In prospectively abolishing the death penalty, the legislature did not simply express the will of the people that it no longer makes sense to maintain the costly and unsatisfying charade of a capital punishment scheme in which no one ever receives the ultimate punishment. Public Act 12-5 also held a mirror up to Connecticut’s long, troubled history with capital punishment: the steady replacement by more progressive forms of punishment; the increasing inability to achieve legitimate penological purposes; the freakishness with which the sentence of death is imposed; the rarity with which it is carried out; and the racial, ethnic, and socio-economic biases that likely are inherent in any discretionary death penalty system. Because such a system fails to comport with our abiding freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, we hold that capital punishment, as currently applied, violates the constitution of Connecticut."