The death penalty: a peculiar institution

Stephen Hayes has become our 10th resident on death row. Joshua Komisarjevsky may join him next year. Like the other nine on death row, they will die in prison, though perhaps not for a long time, because of illness, assault, suicide or old age.

Like it or loathe it, capital punishment in Connecticut is doomed. Its abolishment is inevitable.

Connecticut executed 108 persons, including a 12-year-old Indian girl, in its first three centuries, all by hanging. Nineteen died in the electric chair from 1937 to 1960. “Mad Dog� Taborsky, famous for a string of convenience store murders, was the last to go.

Since then, only one person has been dispatched by lethal injection, and then only at his request.

Execution of Michael Ross

Five years ago, doing the research for a long article, “You, Me and the Death Penalty,� for the Hartford Courant’s now-defunct Sunday magazine, I got a close-up view of Connecticut’s style of rarely carried-out capital punishment, unlike Texas, Virginia, Alabama, Florida and other less squeamish states.

My interviews with the parents of girls who had been murdered by serial-killer Michael Ross were among the most painful experiences of my reporting life. I knew there could never be “closure� for them no matter how we deal with the monsters in our midst.

Ross, tiring of his many years on death row, had volunteered for immediate death. As the newspapers said, his goal was “suicide by state.� Connecticut did not exactly rush to oblige him. Indeed, it could not. We pay prosecutors to speed up justice and public defenders to slow things down — to make sure that true justice is done. Death row occupants get to appeal their fate time after time, all at great expense to the taxpayer.

We don’t want to be like the more benighted states where justice is quicker, because the actual and provable innocence of some of the convicted is irrelevant. We in Connecticut are troubled (or should be) by the exonerations after long-term imprisonments of five of our own innocent men in the last five years, and by the knowledge that our most obvious blameless man still behind bars, Richard Lapointe, escaped death row only because jurors took notice of his lifelong mental and physical impairments.

So it was nice of Ross to volunteer for death, but we could only assist him by making sure he was “competentâ€� to make that decision. A mentally unbalanced inmate, like a sick prisoner, must be made well before we do him in.  

In a New London courtroom, sitting behind the man who had murdered at least eight girls and young women, I was struck by the absurdity of it all.

We were dancing to his tune. Instead of a life-without-parole sentence which simply would have condemned him to rot away in prison, unpublicized and forgotten, the death penalty had made Ross a master of ceremonies.  

The saga of Michael Ross was a national and international media sensation in 2005. He was a celebrity, and he was in charge. If, at the last moment, he changed his mind about dying, we would all go back to square one — feeling perhaps like idiots.

One day, at long last, I made my way to Somers soon after midnight for the early morning execution. A fleet of TV satellite trucks was lined up outside the prison’s visitor center, now mobbed by media people.

None of this, of course, was to show the actual execution to the public in prime time. Because we are civilized, unlike folks who once turned lynchings into spectacles, the act of applying the lethal chemical cocktail by a government employee is done quietly in the wee hours while most of the state is sleeping. The sole role of the massed press was to record the assurances of the authorities that Ross had not changed his mind, and so was well and truly dead.

A house divided

Let’s face it: The whole business is absurd. My studies tell me that the death penalty is a swift and efficient tool in our justice-system kit in only one way: as an almost surefire threat used by unscrupulous police interrogators to force an innocent suspect over the finish line of a false confession. If you wonder about this, read the latest and terrific based-on-true-cases novel “Confession� by John Grisham, my colleague at Northwestern Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions.

It is no wonder that one of the many books on capital punishment has the title, “Peculiar Institution,� a reminder of the euphemism used by polite society for slavery when it was widely seen as necessary, indispensable and even uplifting for the Africans.

Connecticut, the Constitution State according to our license plates, was once of two minds about slavery.

Today it is a house divided about capital punishment. Thus do we stagger into the future: three steps forward, two steps backward, fighting the better angels of our natures as we move ever closer to the light.

Donald S. Connery is a retired Time-Life foreign correspondent who lives in Kent. Among his books is “Guilty Until Proven Innocent,� the recently reprinted story of the 1973 Barbara Gibbons murder case.

Woman’s Club holiday sale

SHARON — The Sharon Woman’s Club will hold its annual holiday bake and wreath sale on Saturday, Nov. 20, between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. in front of the Sharon Pharmacy.  

Baked goods and homemade soups, as well as wreaths in a variety of sizes will be available. All proceeds will be donated to the Sharon Fuel Bank.   

 The good Dr. Petit will appear, time after time, his hair ever whiter, to make sure no one forgets the enormity of their transgressions. Futility is the name of the game.

I realize that such a cold dash of reality is ill timed. Connecticut’s blood is up about the horrors inflicted on Jennifer Hawke-Petit, daughters Hayley and Michaela, and the suffering of the battered lone survivor. “An eye for an eye� is back in fashion. People say: Let the two monsters be killed without delay and with equal cruelty; forget the legal niceties.

I have no trouble imagining primitive emotions were the lives of my own loved ones extinguished so savagely. Except I would not choose a rapid execution. Better would be some kind of incessant torment of the naked murderer in a cold steel chamber where (stealing from Edgar Allan Poe) the walls close in an inch a day for at least a year until there is a very slow crushing of limbs and brain.

Sorry to be so explicit. Obviously, a slow crushing is not the civilized way to do it. We are better than that. Indeed, we are now so civilized (almost European!) that we avoid killing the “worst of the worstâ€� even while maintaining the death penalty for exactly that purpose.  

Ideally, these prisoners should all be long forgotten, but, and only because of their death penalty distinction, you can count on their frequent reappearance in the courts and the headlines as their appeals drag through the system over the years.