Courant.com

Foley, Malloy Disagree On Death Penalty

Kevin Rennie

NOW YOU KNOW

12:05 PM EDT, September 26, 2010

Events threaten to intrude on a gubernatorial campaign fought over economic issues. Democrat Dannel Malloy and Republican Tom Foley are carrying out an advertising war over who's telling the truth about the number of jobs created or lost in Stamford while Malloy was mayor and how many workers were fired or hired during Foley's ownership of a Georgia mill.

Balancing state government's budget and creating the conditions that will revive private job creation in Connecticut will be the great challenge of the next governor. That is not the only issue on the minds of many Connecticut voters. The first of two trials in the gruesome murders of three members of the Petit family of Cheshire rivets the state each day it is in session in New Haven.

Although Judge Jon C. Blue told the jurors that the day they viewed pictures of the crime scene would be the worst of their ordeal, plenty of jarring testimony has followed and will continue in the trial of Steven Hayes, the first of the two fiends accused of killing Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters, Haley and Michaela, three years ago at their Cheshire home.

Defendant Joshua Komisarjevsky's trial will follow Hayes' and include a repeat of the gruesome testimony we are hearing and the horrifying evidence that has been introduced so far. The trial is receiving detailed coverage from state media and a lot of attention from media outlets from around the nation. Even when you want to avert your gaze or catch your breath, there are days when news of the trial's proceedings is inescapable, as are thoughts of the inhumanity of what the dead and Dr. William Petit, the stoic survivor who was left to die in the basement of their home, endured during their hours of torment that Monday morning.

State prosecutors have been resolute in their determination to see the two defendants sentenced to death for their crimes. We might know by Election Day if a jury has convicted and sentenced Hayes. If the jury does condemn him to death, voters will decide on Nov. 2 if that sentence will be carried out. This is the first time in memory when a high-profile, emotional murder trial has been in the news so close to a gubernatorial election.

By voting for Malloy, voters would give a reprieve to convicts who are sentenced to death. The Democratic candidate has been clear and consistent in his opposition to the death penalty. He would sign a bill repealing if the General Assembly passes it. The Democratic legislature has done that and only Gov. M. Jodi Rell's veto preserved the option of imposing the ultimate punishment in Connecticut.

There's no reason to think that Malloy will be anything other than resolute in his position opposing the death penalty, however incensed the mood of the voters becomes during the Petit trials. On the other hand, Republican Foley supports the death penalty. A vote for him will be affirming the imposition of the death penalty, should it be imposed. Believing what Foley says is more of a gamble than with many other politicians, but on the death penalty he's unlikely to say he did not understand what it means.

Connecticut residents, by some elastic margin, have long favored the death penalty. The state's capital punishment law before 1995 was difficult to impose because no matter how heinous the crime, if a jury found some mitigating factor in a murderer's tale — his mother didn't like him much, for example — he would not face death.

The current law requires a jury to weigh the aggravating factors in a capital crime — there are plenty in the Petit case — against any mitigating ones. None of those come to mind with what we know so far. New Haven prosecutor Michael Dearington in his long career has sought the death penalty only once before prosecuting Hayes and Komisarjevsky. This is not about bloodlust. Connecticut juries have also been restrained. We aren't Texas, or even Arkansas, where in 1992 presidential hopeful Gov. Bill Clinton returned home to make sure there was no last-minute reprieve in the execution of a mentally retarded man.

Kevin Rennie is a lawyer and a former Republican state legislator. He can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com.

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-rennie-0926-20100926,0,7622755.column