Mar 23, 2012

Conn. committee passes death penalty repeal bill despite recent poll findings on issue

ATTENTION: CONCERNED CONNECTICUT RESIDENTS WHO VALUE PUBLIC SAFETY!

For all Connecticut citizens against the Death Penalty Repeal Bill,  please get on the phone to the following Senators and express your adamant wish that they vote against this Repeal .

Senator Prague  860 240 0543   Senator Maynard 860 240 0584  Senator Crisco 860 240 0189

There are voice mails at each number and as such you will be asked to give your name and phone number probably to assure that you are a Connecticut resident. No one will actually call you back, but you are given ample time to leave a message that should begin with the basics, in case the Senator's aides do not listen to a lengthy message and delete any messages that are beyond a minute or two.

State that you are adamantly opposed to the Death Penalty Repeal Bill that recently passed the Judiciary committee and will be heading to the Senate shortly. Beseech these lawmakers to do the right thing and vote against the Repeal!  A repeal will lead to further violence in our State. It is the beginning of the end, literally handing over our courts to murderers rapists and their often state finance public defenders or special public defenders who like Jeremiah Donovan, Joshua Komisarjevsky's lawyer, are paid a higher wage than "regular public defenders and are allowed many more billable hours and money and resources in defending capital murder crimes.

Senator Prague (860)240-0543. Senator Maynard (860)240-0584. Senator Crisco (860)240-0189. It is on to the Senate next and these are 3 critical votes. Leave a message on the voice mail's for these Senators, as well as any other Senators that are in your district, that are on the fence or that you feel might be influenced by the strength of your opinion. Victims and survivors of violent crime, family members and loved ones of victims obviously will have powerful voices, but everyone in this state will become a potential victim of this bill - so please make those calls!

The Senate is the only hope left for defeating the repeal of the death penalty in Connecticut. It must pass by a certain margin to get to the Governors desk.  There is considerable dissent regarding this bill among even our lawmakers; Had two Republican Judiciary Committee members voted against the repeal following their party's official position, the vote would have been 22-21 in the Judiciary, rather than 24-19.

I am dismayed and extremely angry at our own Trumbull Rep who voted for this repeal and then blathered on about abortions when he had the floor!  Abortion was not the issue on the agenda Sir.

I predict that this man will be voted out of his seat come next election when his constituents are heavily reminded of how this Republican lawmaker put all of our lives in peril with his vote to repeal the death penalty in it's originating  committee.

The Death Penalty is of course a deterrent, as one Senator in the Judiciary Committee said, if it deters one person from murdering, it has done it's job.

Life in Prison will become the new" cruel and unusual punishment" and the public defenders and other lawyers will all proceed to trial for every capital murder as a matter of course, in hopes of receiving life with the chance of parole for their murderers and rapists who prey upon the vulnerable. Our Connecticut prosecutors are not adept at trying these cases for they rarely rarely go to trial in this state. 96 -97 percent of all violent crime cases are adjudicated via plea deals, such as Leslie Williams whose lawyer quickly offered to plead guilty to capital murder and other charges in exchange for life in prison, because the death penalty exists.

Williams is the man who in 2008 burst into a Connecticut home where two women had sat down to after church coffee to chat. He shot one sixty seven year old woman in the head leaving her for dead. He then Kidnapped the other woman who was being treated for cancer, He stole her car and raped her, then shot her in the head as well, and throwing her body in some brush.

 This crime occurred just after Williams had been released from prison for raping a five year old girl, at the end of a seven year sentence which was arrived at by a plea deal rather than a trial (note; a seven year sentence for this crime is by Connecticut standards, a severe sentence) William stole a car right off the bat after getting out of prison and the car happened to run out of gas in front of the victims house.
He watched as the women entered the home as they returned from church waiting a few minutes,  he followed them in and began his murderous mayhem.

This horrible set of crimes occurred within 6 months of the Petit murders and happened in a quiet middle class suburb where people often make life long sacrifices in order to live in what they believe is a safe neighborhood.

The bottom line is that without a Death Penalty Leslie Williams lawyer would NEVER EVER have plead guilty to life without the chance of PAROLE.  The case would have gone to trial, as there would be nothing for murderers to lose" by going to trial for capital murder, and the groundswell of trials will cost the state millions and eventually billions of dollars. This eradicates the entire  argument by mostly democratic legislators that getting rid of the Death Penalty will save this State money due to the expensive built in appeals process. A process that in Connecticut is the biggest part of the problem rendering our Death penalty  impossible to actually implement.

The mostly democratic legislators begginning within the Judicary Comittee and the House, are responsible for purposeful crippling of Connecticut's current death penalty, leaving it in its current impotent state. Then they have the audacity and hypocrisy to use the very fact that the appeals process has crippled it as a reason to scrap it because its become too expensive as a result of the literally endless appeals that inmates and their attorneys file ad infinitum.

The Death Penalty clearly needs to be re-written and the appeals limited to a valid quantify per convicted person and appeals must require actual grounds, rather than simply being an automatic part of this sentence in Connecticut.

Other states such as Virginia and Texas have managed to create a death penalty that is not in name only, this they have done because as intelligent lawmakers they recognize that the DP is of course a deterrent as common sense dictates. And one innocent victim's life saved as a result of the existence of a working death penalty, is worth IT.

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/98b0a17ad0354b2ab4f152f0b403c014/CT--Death-Penalty

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