"Death row inmates back holding trial in prison," is the Connecticut AP report, via the Day.
Connecticut death row inmates who are suing the state over alleged racial and geographic biases in the state's death penalty are supporting a plan to hold the trial in a prison instead of a courthouse.
Inmates' lawyers said in a court document filed Friday that the plan by state officials was "adequate." The plan calls for the trial to be held at Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, which houses death row, beginning in September and be broadcast via a live video feed to Rockville Superior Court so the public can watch.
The trial would be held in one of the prison's dayrooms, where each inmate and his lawyer would sit together at their own table.
Nine of the 10 men on death row are plaintiffs in the appeal. The state repealed capital punishment for all future crimes earlier this year.
Inmates objected to an earlier plan by the state to hold the trial in Rockville and allow them to watch video feeds in their cells.
The plan to hold the trial in the prison still needs approval by a judge. A hearing on issue is scheduled for July 25 in Rockville.
And:
Six death row inmates are black and three are white, when blacks make up only 10 percent of the state's population. Inmates' lawyers also say several inmates on death row were prosecuted in Waterbury, bolstering claims of geographic bias.
Earlier coverage of questions of racial bias in Connecticut's death sentences begins at the link.
Also from Connecticut, "Death row inmate says new law unfair," by AP writer Pat Eaton-Robb. It's via the Wilmington News Journal.
Daniel Webb is awaiting execution for the 1989 kidnapping and murder of a Connecticut bank executive, but he believes he is also paying a price for another, unrelated crime that has heavily influenced the state's debate on capital punishment.
Webb told The Associated Press in a death row interview that he thinks there would be no capital punishment in the state if not for the public's desire to execute the men responsible for the 2007 home-invasion slayings of a mother and her two daughters in suburban Cheshire. The only survivor of that crime, Dr. William Petit, lobbied to keep the death penalty for the men who killed his family, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky.
"Dr. Petit is angry with them and with his anger he wants to kill all of us," said Webb, who spoke by telephone from behind a glass window. "Now you are trying to increase my suffering and take away the little that I had because you want to make Komisarjevsky suffer. That's not right."
Webb was sentenced to die for the slaying in Hartford of Diane Gellenbeck, a 37-year-old Connecticut National Bank vice president, who was taken from a downtown parking garage and shot to death near a local golf course as she ran from an attempted sexual assault.
The state legislature in April abolished capital punishment, but only for future crimes. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and key state lawmakers had insisted on that as a condition of their support for repeal in a long-running debate that focused on the Petit case.
Earlier coverage of the racial bias lawsuit and Connecticut's repeal of the death penalty begins at the links.
Comments