Two Perspectives on the Death Penalty.

From the New Haven Independent, a different kind of story about death row:

Five blocks from where Steven Hayes’s fate is being decided—whether the state will execute him for his part in the Petit family murders—another man told his own story about an 18-year brush with the death penalty. He lived to tell a tale about a dream of salvation and what can happen to “monsters” behind bars.

The former death row inmate, Juan Roberto Melendez Colon, spoke Wednesday night to a packed room at the Yale Law School at a forum on the death penalty. The forum had been planned months in advance but happened to coincide with the death penalty phase of the most sensational trial in New Haven in recent memory.

Melendez was sentenced to death for the 1983 murder of a Florida hairdresser, although he denied knowing the victim and no physical evidence linked him to the crime. He was exonerated in 2002 after his attorneys found evidence in the original trial record that another man had confessed to the murder.

READ STORY

From my own blog, a discussion of whether mitigating arguments in the Hayes case should matter: 

The process of considering mitigating factors is intentionally subtle. Taking a citizen's life is an enormous exercise of power by the state, and it ought not to be entered into casually. It makes sense to take time and weigh the fundamental question: is it more appropriateto lock this person up for the rest of his life or to execute him? Those are two very different actions. I'm hoping the jury is probing more deeply into the question than "who cares?"

Who does care?

For one, the people of the world who oppose the death penalty. That's a lot of people. Few nations still use it. There are almost no nations whose societies or government signfiicantly resemble ours who have it. None of Connecticut's neighboring states have it. For those of us who oppose the death penalty, every effort made to avoid imposing it any case -- even this admittedly heinous one -- is something we care about.

READ STORY

From our archives, a state poll on the death penalty.