Updated at 10:00 a.m. ET: With the Connecticut Senate voting early Thursday to repeal the death penalty, the state is poised to become the fifth in five years to end the practice.

Legislative action was delayed last year amid the high-profile prosecution of a death penalty case involving a brutal home invasion that left a mother and her two daughters dead. But after a debate that stretched into the early morning hours Thursday, the Senate voted 20-16 to approve legislation that would replace the death penalty with life without parole.

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“Connecticut’s criminal justice system has taken a historic step forward. In a system of justice that is no(t) perfect, we must not employ a penalty that requires perfection. The punishment of life in prison without the possibility of release makes more sense,” Senate President Donald E. Williams, Jr., a Democrat, said in a statement. “These inmates will face conditions that are similar to and in some cases more severe than conditions on death row. It is a punishment and sentence that is certain and final.”

The bill will now head to the House of Representatives, where observers say it is likely to pass. Gov. Daniel Malloy has said he would sign the legislation because it is forward looking, and not retroactive to those already sitting on death row.

Senate leadership held a press conference at the Capitol Wednesday ahead of the vote, with families of murder victims joining them. Senate Republican opponents organized their own news conference, which was attended by the lone survivor of the home invasion case in Cheshire and families of other murder victims.

“For those who say that we should execute those 11 (currently on death row) but none going further, the only way to keep that promise … is to keep our death penalty law,” Republican State Sen. John McKinney said. “I also think we need to talk about the message it sends that some who murder viciously the families in Connecticut should face the death penalty but others should not. Are we … saying that those families and the lives of those victims are somehow less important? For me, that is a wrong and terrible message to send.”

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that the state's voters are against repealing the death penalty by a margin of 62 percent to 31 percent. A 2011 poll showed that 48 percent of those surveyed preferred the death penalty over life in prison with no chance of parole (43 percent) in first-degree murder cases.

"As we've seen in past Quinnipiac University polls, Connecticut voters still think abolishing the death penalty is a bad idea," said Douglas Schwartz, poll director. "No doubt the gruesome Cheshire murders still affect public opinion regarding convicts on death row."

'Clear trend'
If the legislation passes the House and is signed by the governor, Connecticut would be the fifth state in five years to repeal the death penalty, joining 16 others that have no capital punishment. California voters will decide in November whether to also do away with it.

“This was a courageous and historic vote, but it was also in line with a growing trend away from the death penalty around the country. Connecticut’s legislature has come to the same conclusion that other legislatures have recently made: the death penalty is too risky, too expensive, and too unfair to continue," Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), said in a statement.

A bill to repeal Connecticut's death penalty passed in 2009, but then Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed it. Last year, the bill made it through the joint House and Senate Judiciary Committee. But it died before a full Senate vote after a few senators withdrew their support because a second man charged in the Cheshire home invasion case was about to go on trial, said Ben Jones, executive director of the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty.

But it is now possible to have the death penalty debate not amid the “heated nature of a capital trial," so "people are able to think about it more at a systematic level,” said Shari Silberstein, executive director of Equal Justice USA.

Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes were convicted in the 2007 Cheshire killings of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11. The girls were tied to their beds and doused in gasoline before the house was set ablaze; they died of smoke inhalation; their mother was strangled.

The lone survivor of the invasion, Dr. William A. Petit Jr., along with his sister, Johanna Petit-Chapman, oppose the repeal.

“We believe in the death penalty because we believe it is really the only true just punishment for certain heinous and depraved murders. One thing you never hear the abolitionists talk about is the victims, almost never, the forgotten people. The people who died and can’t be heard to speak for themselves,” Petit said at a press conference. “I think prospective (not retroactive) repeal of the death penalty is false. There’ll be multiple appeals for people already on death row.”

Williams, the Senate president, said before the vote that similar legislation has withstood judicial reviews.

"We're very respectful of those who are in favor of the death penalty," he said. "Yet those folks who have already been convicted and are serving under the prior rules of conviction do not have their sentences altered."

If the legislation becomes law, it would apply to capital offenses committed on or after the effective date of the act. It creates new conditions for those convicted of “murder with special circumstances” -- previously capital crimes -- including being moved to a new cell every 90 days and only having two hours a day out of their cell.

There are 11 inmates on Connecticut's death row. The state has carried out one execution since 1976. Connecticut’s Office of Fiscal Analysis estimated that the state spends $5 million a year on the death penalty system, according to the DPIC.

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The number of death sentences imposed in the U.S. has taken an “historic drop” -- about 75 percent -- over the last 15 years, accompanied by a nearly 60 percent decline in the number of executions, a death penalty awareness group reported Thursday.  

The release of the annual report by the Death Penalty Information Center follows recent polls showing a withering of support for capital punishment over controversial cases like that of Troy Davis, who was executed in Georgia in September. The decline in the use of the death penalty also has likely been influenced by states’ worsening financial conditions, said Richard Dieter, the center’s executive director.

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Capital punishment was imposed in 78 cases this year, down from 315 in 1996 -- the first time that number was below 100 since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, the report said. There were also 43 executions -- including that of Davis -- in 13 states, down from 98 in 1999, according to the report.

 

 

"This is a historic drop in death sentences and I think it’s indicative of deep concerns about the death penalty in the public and it’s mirrored in falling executions, falling support in polls and even in legislation which has abolished the death penalty in a number of states," Dieter said.

Dieter was referring to the abandonment of the death penalty in Illinois, New Mexico, New Jersey and New York in recent years. Three other states – California, Connecticut and Maryland – are considering doing away with capital punishment, he said, and Oregon's governor recently declared a moratorium on executions during his tenure.

Dieter said that the legislative action and decline in public support is the result of people being freed from death row because of DNA testing, investigative work by the media and the international outcry over the Davis case, in which seven of the nine eyewitnesses changed their stories.

“I think that shook the confidence that some people had about the death penalty, that it really does risk innocent lives -- even though many are guilty -- there’s still the danger and so juries are returning less death sentences, prosecutors are seeking it less,” he said. “Courts are looking at these cases more closely and governors are sometimes granting clemency, all because of the doubts and disfavor of the death penalty as it has been applied in the past 10 years.”

Texas led the way in executions in 2011 with 13, followed by Alabama at six, Ohio, 5, and Georgia and Arizona each with four. The South and West accounted for 87 percent of the death sentences, while the Midwest and Northeast made up 12 percent. Meanwhile, many death penalty states, such as Indiana, Maryland and South Carolina, did not impose it during the year, the center said.

A Gallup poll released in mid-October showed that 61 percent of Americans approve of capital punishment as a sentence for those convicted of murder -- the lowest level of support since 1972, when the Supreme Court voided state death penalty laws since they were seen as "being infrequently applied in an unpredictable and arbitrary way," the center said. (The court allowed executions to restart in 1976 after some states revised their death penalty statutes to "limit the haphazardness of the death penalty," the center said.)

Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, said Wednesday that he “strongly” disagreed that public sentiment against the death penalty was growing.

“I think that the numbers show that the majority of the public still believe that in those rare and outrageous cases that the death penalty is an appropriate sanction,” he said, noting that murders were down about 50 percent nationwide in the last 20 years. “One of the reasons for that, I believe, is because … the criminal justice system has done a good job at targeting those violent offenders nationwide” and handing out “long and stiff sentences.”

“It hasn’t been a revolving door for the last 20 years, they’re out of commission and as such, crime in every category has gone down,” he added.

Burns also noted that the number of life-without-parole sentences imposed began to grow in the late 1990s, which could account for any decrease in death sentences.

“There were a number of states that passed … for lack of a better term, a ‘truth in sentencing’ (law), which said life or life without parole really does mean life without parole,” he said. So in those states, that "could also be a reason as (to) why we are seeing fewer death penalties. Frankly, there are some people that think it’s a more severe penalty to have somebody sit in prison for their entire life than be executed.”

Dollars and cents were another factor contributing to states shuttering their death penalty program, Dieter said. In California, the state’s former prison director and the former prosecutor who penned California's current death penalty statute are pushing to end it, with a citizens’ initiative expected to be on the ballot next year. A recent study there found that the state has spent more than $4 billion on its capital punishment system since 1978, under which there have been 13 executions.

“All of the states are facing the questions of cutting back on schools, libraries, even police forces and so they’re trying to find programs that are expensive and aren’t really serving the public well or aren’t working, and I think the death penalty fits into that category,” Dieter said. “This is not a system that ... makes practical sense and it’s still costly.”

The problems with the death penalty could lead to attempts to fix the system or to abandon it entirely, said Dieter, noting his group is not necessarily opposed to capital punishment, only to what he termed its unfair and inaccurate application in the U.S. As for its future, he noted: “I think we’ll see ... not any one grand move, but probably a continuation in 2012 of declining use of the death penalty.”