It's hard to die on state's death row

If, as expected, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, the killers of the wife and daughters of William Petit, are sentenced to death by lethal ejection sometime next year, they will join 11 other men on Connecticut’s death row and remain there for as long as they both shall live. We can’t know how long that will be, but one thing is almost certain: They will not be executed by lethal injection unless they volunteer.

The inmates awaiting execution at the Northern Correctional Institution in Somers have been there from a few weeks to nearly 20 years. Robert Breton, sentenced in 1989 for the beating and stabbing deaths of his wife and teenage son, will reach his 20th year on death row in October. Two others aren’t far behind: Daniel Webb, sentenced in 1991 for kidnapping and killing Diane Gellenbeck, a 37-year-old bank vice president, and Sedrick Cobb, who was also sentenced 18 years ago for kidnapping, raping and killing a 23-year-old Watertown woman. Three others have been on death row for 10 years or more. The newest resident, Richard Roszkowski, was sentenced just two weeks ago for a triple murder in Bridgeport in 2006.

Michael Ross, the serial killer of eight young women and the only person executed in Connecticut since the death penalty was reinstated in 1973, received the only state-administered lethal injection in 2005 because he refused to continue the appeal process. If he hadn’t said he wanted to spare his victims’ families any more pain and rejected further appeals, there would be 12 men waiting for Hayes and Komisarjevsky today.

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According to a summary issued in April by the Office of Legislative Research, a criminal defendant sentenced to death gets an automatic stay of execution while his conviction is reviewed by the Connecticut State Supreme Court, but that is only the beginning.

“The court may also extend this stay of execution when the defendant applies for a writ of error, writ of certiorari, writ of habeas corpus, application for a pardon, motion for reconsideration, motion to set aside the judgment, motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, motion for additur or remitter or petition for a new trial.â€

Space doesn’t permit a translation, but you can be assured this process can take some time. The word “eternity†comes to mind. And if someone on death row should exhaust all appeals in 25 or 30 or 40 years, a defense attorney can be expected to try something relatively new, known as the death row syndrome appeal, which makes the rather reasonable claim that decades on death row can drive an inmate crazy.

Connecticut’s death penalty is a masterpiece of legislative cynicism and compromise. It tells the majority of Connecticut voters who support the death penalty that the state provides one and tells opponents it is a harmless penalty that kills no one. This year, a Democratic majority in the General Assembly voted to abolish the death penalty, but when the governor vetoed the bill, the “veto-proof†Democratic majority could not find the votes to overturn the veto, so the death penalty dance continues.

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Those of us who consider the death penalty a barbaric act unworthy of a civilized state or nation might consider this deathless death penalty a good thing. But Connecticut’s death penalty, as it exists today, should satisfy no one. It is an act of cruel and unusual punishment, not for the killers being walked through the legal morass that will likely allow them to evade execution for the rest of their natural lives, but for the victims — the surviving loved ones of those whose lives they took.

William Petit, the Cheshire physician whose wife and children were murdered two years ago, has characterized the killers as “heinous murderers who have forfeited their rights to continue to live among us†and who can blame him? He wants to see them executed and presumably has been led to believe the Connecticut death penalty can be made to work in his case.

This cruel hoax against the Petit family, made possible by the governor and Legislature, is being abetted by prosecutors who are going through the crowd-pleasing act of seeking the execution of Hayes and Komisarjevsky even though they surely know it will never happen.

The prosecutors have an enthusiastic accomplice in the state’s victim advocate Michelle Cruz, who has joined them in actively opposing attempts by the defendants’ public defenders to allow the two killers to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison without the possibility of release.

 â€œOur system is out of kilter — victims’ rights are totally abused,†said Dr. Petit at a hearing on the case in July. He’s right, but the abusers in his case are the victims’ advocate and the prosecutors who insist on indulging in the charade that is the Connecticut death penalty.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.