Connecticut’s House of Representatives voted on April 11 to
abolish the death penalty prospectively, which is another way of saying that
the General Assembly will not apply its morals and its legal prescriptions to
the Connecticut 11, inmates presently awaiting punishment on Death Row.
The abolition bill having passed both houses of the
General Assembly, will be made operative upon Governor Dannel Malloy’s
signature.
The prospective abolition bill is the single most cowardly piece of legislation
passed in the last half century, and it gives the lie to every argument made in
the General Assembly in favor of abolition.
But in the case of the 11 inmates awaiting execution, the bill approved by Mr.
Sharkey visits upon them a reciprocal evil. And we would be no less safe, the
pro-repeal forces in the General Assembly have repeatedly assured us, if the
sentences of the Connecticut 11 had been commuted to life in prison retrospectively.
Mr. Sharkey has yet to share with us the moral precept that justifies a penalty
of death for 11 Death Row inmates who are to be executed AFTER the law
authorizing execution has been abolished.
A death penalty abolition that leaves 11 Death Row inmates subject to execution
by no means satisfies the prescriptions of the Paris conference.
In order to make abolition palatable for wavering
politicians, the leaders of the Senate responsible for passing the bill,
President Pro-tem Don Williams and Senate Majority Leader Martin
Looney, inserted into the legislation a provision that will retain Death Row
for prisoners who in the future commit heinous crimes. Death has been
abolished, but Death Row lives on. In time, prisoners who have been spared
death, courtesy of the moral epigones in the General Assembly, will mingle in
the same general space with others sentenced to death whose crimes will be no
less heinous.
Here is House Majority Leader J. Brendan Sharkey
fulminating, just prior to passage, that the death penalty has not eradicated
evil:
"Despite having the death penalty in our society here
in Connecticut for several hundred years ... it certainly hasn't eradicated
evil from our society. If we as human beings created laws that reciprocate the
evil that's perpetrated on society, are they really protecting us? ... Our laws
more project our better selves."
Following abolition, national president of the NAACP
Benjamin Jealous said, “This vote tonight ... allows Connecticut to break with
a centuries-old tradition of executing people and rejoin the rest of the
Western world, which has long since cut bait with the death penalty. It also
moves our nation forward." But as long as the Connecticut 11 are subject
to the death penalty, it cannot be said that Connecticut has “moved forward.”
Meeting in Paris in February 2007, the forward looking 3rd
World Congress Against The Death Penalty pointedly noted that
abolition was not nearly enough to satisfy the demands of justice: “We
recognize that the process of abolition must be accompanied by a better
consideration of the needs of victims and by an in-depth reflection on penal
policy and prison systems, in the framework of an equitable and restorative
justice… We demand with one voice the end throughout the world of justice that
kills. No authority has the right to strike out a person’s life. We recall that
the death penalty is a cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, that it is
contrary to human rights, that it has no utility in the fight against crime,
and that it always represents a failure of justice.”
Every argument made in the General Assembly in support of
prospective death penalty abolition, sufficient
or not, applies as well to retrospective abolition. And every argument made
by partisan Democrats in Connecticut in support of abolition would apply
equally to the Federal
Death Penalty Abolition Act of 2011, a bill co-sponsored by 15 Democratic
Representatives. Democratic contenders for congress – most especially Speaker
of the House Chris Donovan, who organized support for Connecticut’s death
penalty abolition bill -- should be asked in the course of their debates
whether they will support the Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act.
ADDENDUM
Following the vote in the House to abolish the Death
penalty, Tom Hill (1320am, WATR Waterbury) interviewed state Rep.
David Labriola on April 15.
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