Breaking News: Gov Rell Will Veto Bill To Ban Death Penalty In Constitution State

Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell has stated that she will immediately veto the General Assembly’s bill to ban the death penalty in the Constitution State. Lawmakers will now have to get enough votes to override the veto in order to pass the measure. Some thoughts: For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. ALBERT CAMUS Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but it serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment; therefore the principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment. WILLIAM J. BRENNAN, judicial opinion, Jul. 2, 1976 When a juvenile commits a heinous crime, the State can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the State cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity. ANTHONY KENNEDY, judicial opinion on Roper v. Simmons, Mar. 1, 2005 The practice of executing such offenders is a relic of the past and is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society. Justice John Paul Stevens While a public opinion poll obviously is of some assitance in indicating public acceptance or rejection of a specific penalty, its utility cannot be very great ... People who were fully informed as to the purposes of the death penalty and its liabilities would find the penalty shoking, unjust, and unacceptable. Justice Thurgood Marshall I am more optimistic though, that this court will eventually conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that is -- and the death penalty -- must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive. Justice Harry Blackman Perhaps the whole business of the retention of the death penalty will seem to the next generation, as it seems to many even now, an anachronism too discordant to be suffered, mocking with grim reproach all our clamorous professions of the sanctity of life Justice Benjamin Cardozo More often than we want to recognize, some innocent defendants have been convicted and sentenced to death. Justice Sandra Day O Connor People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty ... I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Whenever any American life is taken by another unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in defiance of the law … in an attack of violence or in response to violence - the whole nation is degraded. Robert F. Kennedy