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NEW YORK — Connecticut lawmakers debated a measure Wednesday to ban the death penalty in the northeastern state, which could become the fifth US state to repeal capital punishment in the past five years.
The bill, which the state Senate said was under consideration, would replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole.
If the Democratic-controlled Senate approves the measure, the bill would still need approval from the state House of Representatives — where it is expected to pass under a Democratic majority — and then to be signed into law by Governor Dannel Malloy, who supports the measure.
“Today is a dramatic and potentially historic day,” Democratic Senator Eric Coleman said as the debate opened, according to The Hartford Courant.
“The Senate has… an opportunity to correct the arbitrariness, the discrimination, the random haphazard approach to the application of our death penalty in this state.”
The measure would apply only to those convicted after the bill is approved, meaning the 11 people currently on death row could still be executed.
A sentence of life imprisonment “means a definite sentence of 60 years, unless the sentence is life imprisonment without the possibility of release,” in which case “the sentence shall be imprisonment for the remainder of the defendant’s natural life,” the bill read.
The bill was introduced following the high-profile trial of two men sentenced to die for their role in a vicious 2007 attack on the home
of a prominent doctor.
The doctor, William Petit, was beaten with a baseball bat and tied up while his wife was dragged off to a bank to withdraw money. One of the assailants then raped and strangled her, while his accomplice raped the doctor’s 11-year-old daughter.
The girl and her 17-year-old sister were tied to their beds, doused in fuel and left to burn as the intruders set the house ablaze and fled.
Petit, still tied up, escaped to a neighbor’s house and called the police.
The survivor and his sister Johanna were in the Connecticut senate lobbying against the bill, local media reported.
Connecticut’s legislature approved a bill repealing the death penalty in 2009, but the measure was vetoed by then-governor Jodi Rell.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Connecticut has carried out only one execution since the re-establishment of capital punishment in the United States in 1976.
Four other states — Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York — have dropped the death penalty in the past five years, while support is growing in California to repeal the measure.