The personal and policy impacts of capital punishment diverge in Connecticut.

Emma Ledbetter, PC ’10, walked into the New Haven courthouse on a sunny April morning, annoyed that she hadn’t been able to get out of her first stint of jury duty. But she was curious and the day was bright, so she smiled at the rehearsed jokes of courthouse employees; chatted with other potential jurors; and flicked through the pages of The Grapes of Wrath whenever she had a moment.

When she was finally brought into the courtroom, the judge presiding over the case announced its name—Connecticut v. Hayes—and informed potential jurors that the defendant faced the death penalty.

“Whenever I think of jury duty, I think about having to listen to someone complain about someone else hitting their car,” Ledbetter said. “When I first realized what the case was, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to be here.’”

Ledbetter, who grew up in nearby Hamden, Conn., distinctly remembers the crime of which Steven Hayes and co-defendant Joshua Komisarjevsky are accused. On the morning of July 23, 2007, two men invaded the Petit family home in Cheshire, Conn., brutally beating William Petit, the father, and holding the rest of the family hostage.

When law enforcement arrived on the scene, the house had been set ablaze, and the women inside (Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters, 17 and 11) had been doused with gasoline and tied to beds, left to asphyxiate. Hawke-Petit and her eldest daughter had been sexually assaulted, and Petit had stumbled from the house screaming for help, bloody and bound by rope, the only member of his family to have survived the attack.

The suspects allegedly attempted to escape the scene in the Petit family car, ramming three police vehicles before finally being arrested.

The crime shocked Connecticut and dominated headlines in the national media, with People dubbing the murders “Horror in the Night.”

Terrified of Hayes yet deeply liberal, Ledbetter sat waiting for her turn to be questioned by the judge, agonizing over two questions: If these men are found guilty, should the state be allowed to kill them? And if she was chosen for the jury, would she have the heart to sentence even the cruelest killer to death?

***

When Gov. Jodi Rell (R-CT) vetoed 2009 legislation that would have repealed the death penalty, she cited only one case—the Cheshire murders.

“The death penalty is, and ought to be, reserved for those who have committed crimes that are revolting to our humanity and civilized society,” Rell wrote in a statement released on June 5, 2009. “We will not tolerate those who have murdered in the most vile, dehumanizing fashion. We should not, will not, abide those who have killed for the sake of killing.”

Throughout the fight over repeal, the Cheshire case had hung over conflicted legislators, a politically explosive specter. Organizations that had spent years lobbying to repeal capital punishment were forced to stand opposed to Petit, to argue against his pleas that Hayes and Komisarjevsky receive the needle.

“You look at individual cases and they really are horrific crimes,” said Ben Jones, a graduate student in the Political Science Department and executive director of the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty (CNADP), an organization that was heavily involved in the debate over repeal. “People say that’s why we need to keep the death penalty.”

Rell’s veto followed a spectacular fight in the Connecticut Senate that ended in a massive political upset—passage of a bill to repeal the death penalty, which was pushed through in large part by New Haven Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield. “[The passage] was a surprise,” Jones said. “People did not think that was going to happen.”

According to Jones, even CNADP did not believe that it had sufficient support in the weeks leading up to the vote. “We had to be realistic,” he said, adding that the bill did not pass the Senate until just past 4 a.m.. Over the weeks following the bill’s success, Jones and other advocates lobbied hard for the governor to sign the repeal into law: Victims’ families, exonerees from around the country, and various constituents pleaded, demanded meetings, and bombarded the office with letters both in favor of and against repeal. Still, Rell’s position on the death penalty had been unwavering throughout her term in office; when the bill passed, she released a statement saying that she would veto it “as soon as it hit [her] desk.”

“She didn’t seem too gung-ho about doing much to change the death penalty,” Jones said.

Jones concedes that when capital punishment is examined on a case-by-case level, human instinct often tends to side with the needle. Most of Connecticut—61 percent, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll—supports the existence of the death penalty, including half of all Democrats. And cases like the murders in Cheshire bolster the most-cited reason that Connecticut voters wanted to keep capital punishment: retribution.

“I fully support the notion that capital punishment should be legal, but rare,” said State Sen. John Kissel in a statement on his opposition to the bill to repeal. Kissel, whose district includes several corrections facilities, explained in the release that much of his opposition stemmed from fear that without the death penalty, inmates serving life sentences without the possibility of parole could kill corrections officers with impunity.

In the year after the veto, state politicians pieced together a reform bill meant to allay constituent concerns over Connecticut’s use of the death penalty. Some provisions could have standardized the process of implementing the death penalty, allowing alleged discrimination as a basis for challenging death sentences. Others aimed to speed up the appeals process by limiting habeas corpus petitions, a suggestion seen by some as potentially unconstitutional. By the end of March, attempts at reform had died in the Judiciary Committee. To Jones, they missed the fundamental point.

“You cannot fix the death penalty,” he said. “Even supporters see that it’s broken.”

***

Jeff Deskovic was 16 years old when a schoolmate was brutally raped and murdered. Peekskill, his small hometown in New York, was rocked by the crime, and police frantically scrambled for leads. Deskovic raised suspicions when he sobbed uncontrollably at the funeral, and after a number of interrogations, he falsely confessed under pressure from police. He spent over 16 years behind bars before DNA testing exonerated him; on Sept. 22, 2006, Deskovic was released, giving him the opportunity to resume a life that had never truly begun.

“The enormity of what I was about to do really hit me,” said Deskovic of the day he was freed. “Each step I took when no one stopped me made it more and more real. I remember how the thought kept occurring to me that it didn’t seem natural, being out.”

Deskovic’s story represents one major concern with America’s use of the death penalty: The introduction of DNA testing has led to a shocking number of exonerations nationwide, many years after the end of the appeals process. These errors have heightened fears among advocates for repeal that criminal justice leaves too much room for error.

“All of my appeals ran out in 2001, and I wasn’t cleared until five years after that,” Deskovic said. “If I’d been 18 and everything else was the same, and if New York had a death penalty statute, I could have been executed long before I was cleared.”

Since the beginning of DNA testing, 139 inmates on death row have been exonerated across the country, some only days away from their executions. In recent years, three Connecticut men have had lengthy sentences overturned: James Tillman, who served 16 years for rape and kidnapping; Kenneth Ireland, 19 years for rape and murder; and Miguel Roman, 18 years for murder. Though no one in the United States has been officially exonerated after execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Deskovic has no doubt that innocent men have been killed.

Deskovic now works as a criminal justice advocate who frequently speaks in Connecticut; he is also closing in on a master’s degree in criminal justice at Mercy College. Someday, he hopes to run for public office, with the ultimate goal of becoming Governor of New York.

“It’d be a wasted opportunity for me to fade off into the sunset,” he said. “I find meaning in what I do. My whole experience won’t have been for nothing.”

Jones was also drawn to the issue of the death penalty by questions of exoneration. He became interested in the issue of capital punishment during his undergraduate study at Ohio State. Friends brought him to a few Amnesty International events, and he remembers attending vigils, but learning about the case of Troy Davis led him to devote his studies to the issue. Davis, convicted of shooting an off-duty police officer and sentenced to death in 1991, generated massive publicity after the majority of witnesses at his trial recanted their testimony, many claiming police intimidation. Still, he has been denied a retrial and remains in prison.

“Even if you don’t say [Davis] is innocent, there are very strong doubts about his guilt,” Jones said. “Our arguments about this are at a systemic level. As long as you have the death penalty, innocent lives will be put at risk.”

Deskovic agreed: “As I see it, there’s a variety of different arguments against the death penalty, but one that has resonated really well with people regardless of their position is the issue of innocence and the potential for wrongful executions. There are so many near-misses.”

***

Much of Rell’s argument in favor of capital punishment hinges on the idea that the death penalty may prevent the most brutal types of murders. “There is no doubt that the death penalty is a deterrent to those who contemplate such monstrous acts,” she wrote in the aforementioned veto statement. “The statistics supporting this fact, however, are not easily tabulated.”

Indeed, in weighing the merits of the death penalty, legislators have long been plagued by a simple question: Does the existence of capital punishment prevent murders from occurring?

Law School professor John Donohue, GRD ’86, spent years using his econometrics training to evaluate whether America’s death penalty had any impact on criminal deterrence. After examining thousands of cases, he could find no such correlation.

“In my mind, if there is no evidence of deterrence, the death penalty is inflicting pain for no reason,” he said. “And I took a clear position based on years of studying that there was no deterrent effect at all.”

Donohue later narrowed his focus to capital punishment in Connecticut, publishing a detailed report entitled “Capital Punishment in Connecticut, 1973-2007: A comprehensive evaluation from 4600 murders to one execution.” In the report, Donohue argues that the state’s policy regarding the death penalty represents “chaotic and unsound criminal justice policy that serves neither deterrent nor retributive goals.”

“There is simply no benefit, so why take the risk of executing an innocent person?” he asked.

But others, including many family members of murder victims, argue that large-scale statistical studies may not be the best way to evaluate the deterrence effect of capital punishment. One Yale senior who asked to remain anonymous said that his views of the death penalty were informed by his uncle’s murder, which his family had hoped would lead to a capital conviction. Any one murder deterred by the death penalty, he believes, should indicate its value to the criminal justice system.

“I’m wary of huge statistical studies trying to show there is no deterrent effect,” he said in an email. “I think oftentimes they are biased, and that it is simply too difficult to control for the many variables. Yet objectively when trying to judge if it deters, you only need to find individual cases to prove that it does.”

He pointed to the case of Roper v. Simmons, in which the defendant, Christopher Simmons, bragged to co-conspirators that they could “get away with” premeditated murder because they were minors, indicating that had he believed he could be sentenced to death, execution may have deterred him from murdering a neighbor.

“Not all murderers are crazy people,” the student said. “It doesn’t affect all murders, clearly, but some it does, and it’s a waste of time to try debating that it’s worthless in deterring.”

***

The case of the Cheshire murders has raised the profile of Connecticut’s death penalty, bringing to light issues of racial and geographic disparity in its implementation the rights of victims’ families; and the huge costs of the appeals process. According to Jones, the state spends around four million dollars yearly on the death penalty, despite the fact that only 11 men have been sentenced to death since 1976, and one executed. Though Petit is hoping for the Hayes case to end in execution, the death penalty process will substantially prolong the trial, throughout which Petit will be forced to relive his darkest memories.

“If we didn’t have a death penalty, this case would be over,” Donohue said, referring to the defendant’s offer to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison, which the prosecutor refused. “Instead, [Petit] is going to be living with these death penalty hearings for years at the least, maybe decades. For what?”

Ledbetter remembers Hayes’ mugshot showing him as large and pudgy-faced. Now, she says, he is gaunt and hunched, a ghost of the man he once was. He has tried to kill himself in prison, and he briefly toyed with the idea of using the death penalty to commit suicide. His face dominates criminal justice news whenever a new juror is selected.

“I just couldn’t believe that person was him,” said Ledbetter, who was dismissed from jury duty when the judge learned she was a student.

The Cheshire trials may be Connecticut’s last death penalty case; Donohue and Deskovic both believe that capital punishment may be repealed in 2011, after Rell steps down as governor. But for now, the case confuses the population’s perception of whether the death penalty is a government evil or a tool for justice.

And as Jones described, Ledbetter struggled to differentiate her systemic views on the death penalty from her views on Hayes. Though she acknowledged that the system may seem irreparably flawed on a macro level, she felt inclined towards retribution on the micro level.

“I think I’m very opposed to having anything to do with killing somebody,” she said. “But I don’t think I’m that opposed to that happening to him. It’s hard, because if anyone ever gets the death penalty, I want it to be him.”

Cover design by Jinjin Sun.