HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Connecticut's highest court on Thursday ordered the state's death row emptied out, ruling the 2012 law abolishing capital punishment for any future crimes must be applied to the 11 men facing execution for offenses they committed before the measure took effect.
In a sharply divided 4-3 ruling, the court declared the death penalty violates the state's constitution, "no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency and no longer serves any legitimate penological purpose."
"This is a strong decision and I think it's going to be very helpful nationally," said Michael Courtney, who heads the capital defense unit for Connecticut's Office of the Public Defender. "The United States Supreme Court may consider these very issues under the federal constitution in the fall."
The court's ruling cited factors that have come up in other states to abolish the death penalty including racial and economic disparities in its use, the costs involved with appeals, the cruelty of the wait for execution and the risk of executing innocent people.
"They went at this from multiple angles in a way that is going to provide ammunition for abolitionists across the country," said David McGuire, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut.
Opposition to the death penalty has been growing in the United States. Thirty-one states still have capital punishment, but several others have turned against it in recent years, including Nebraska, which voted for abolition in May, and Maryland, which abolished it in 2013. Robert Dunham, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, noted the number of death sentences imposed last year marked a 40-year low in the country.
The ruling comes in an appeal from Eduardo Santiago, whose attorneys successfully argued any execution carried out after the 2012 repeal would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Santiago, whose first death sentence was overturned, faced a second penalty hearing and the possibility of lethal injection for a 2000 murder-for-hire killing in West Hartford.
But the Connecticut ban had been passed prospectively because many lawmakers refused to vote for a bill that would spare the death penalty for Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes. They had been convicted of killing a mother and her two daughters in a highly publicized 2007 home invasion in Cheshire.
Jennifer Hawke-Petit was raped and strangled. Her daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, died of smoke inhalation after they were doused with gasoline and the house was set on fire. Michaela was sexually assaulted.
In his ruling, Palmer wrote it would not be permissible to execute other convicts "merely to achieve the politically popular end of killing two especially notorious inmates."
The ruling drew harsh criticism from the three dissenting justices and legislative Republicans, who accused the court of taking on the role of policymakers.