The Connecticut Supreme Court agreed Thursday to hear death row inmate Eduardo Santiago’s request to extend the recent abolition of the death penalty to his own sentence, despite the bill’s iron-clad language restricting the repeal to new cases.
In April, the state legislature passed a repeal of the death penalty, but the legislation did not apply to those sentenced to death before the law was passed. Out of the 11 inmates currently on the state’s death row, five of them have already appealed to the Court regarding the validity of their sentences. Santiago’s death sentence was overturned in June because of withheld evidence, but he will have to face re-trial unless he can successfully argue that the legislature’s appeal should apply to him, said Mark Rademacher, his attorney. State legislators interviewed were split on how they think Santiago’s case will turn out, with pro-death penalty Republicans predicting he will escape his sentence and anti-death penalty Democrats expecting the appeal to fail.
Republican State Reps. David Labriola and Arthur O’Neill said they have no doubts about Santiago’s success in appealing to the Court. Labriola called the repeal’s “prospective” language, which aims it only at future cases, “disingenuous,” echoing the concerns of many death penalty advocates who feared last spring that a repeal would be used as grounds for the appeals of sentences regardless of its wording.
Both charged that the prospective language was a ploy on the part of
repeal advocates designed to rally as many votes as possible, but State
Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, a Democrat from New Haven and one of the most
outspoken proponents of repeal, responded that it was a political
compromise necessary to ensure the success of the death penalty
abolition movement.
Source: Yale Daily News, Sept. 18, 2012
