Connecticut top court rejects bid to reconsider death penalty ban
By Richard Weizel
MILFORD, Conn. (Reuters) - The Connecticut Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a request by state prosecutors to reconsider its landmark decision in August that eliminated capital punishment in the state and spared the lives of nearly a dozen death-row inmates.
The court upheld its earlier 4-3 ruling that a 2012 state law abolishing capital punishment for future crimes be applied to the 11 men on death row for killings committed before the law took effect.
Thursday's decision came in the case of Eduardo Santiago, who was convicted of killing a man in 2000 for a snowblower in a murder-for-hire case.
Another challenge to the ruling is pending before the Supreme Court involving the case of Russell Peeler Jr., said Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane. Peeler was sentenced to death for ordering the 1999 killing of an 8-year-old boy and his mother because he believed the child had planned to testify that Peeler had murdered another man.
"The Peeler appeal was argued in July 2014, and we submitted new briefs last month, along with the Santiago case, and the issues raised on Peeler are still pending," Kane said on Thursday.
Prosecutors filed a motion last month asking the justices to allow them to reargue the Santiago case, in which justices who ruled in the majority called the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment and concluded that it "no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency."
Prosecutors had asked the court to strike from the record a concurring opinion about racial bias in capital cases they said was barred as merely advisory.
In the opinion, Justices Fleming Norcott and Andrew McDonald wrote that racial and ethnic discrimination had "permeated the breadth of this state's experience with capital charging and sentencing decisions."
Three justices had accused the majority in powerfully worded dissents of cherry-picking facts to reach their decision.
Chief Justice Chase Rogers, one of the three judges who dissented in August, wrote on Thursday that "the majority, over the repeated objections of the dissenting justices, addressed numerous issues that the defendant, Eduardo Santiago, had not raised."
The ruling added Connecticut to the growing list of states backing away from the death penalty, most recently including Nebraska and Maryland. Thirty-one states still allow the punishment.
(Editing by Scott Malone and Peter Cooney)
