State’s Supreme Court Upholds Death Penalty

HARTFORD (AP) — The Connecticut Supreme Court on Monday upheld both the state’s death penalty law and the death sentence of a man who killed a 13-year-old boy with a sledgehammer in 1997.

Both decisions came in the appeal of 33-year-old death row inmate Todd Rizzo, whose lawyers challenged Rizzo’s convictions and the legality of the state’s death penalty under the Connecticut Constitution.

The high court issued a 6-1 decision rejecting all of Rizzo’s arguments and upholding his death sentence. Justice Flemming L. Norcott, Jr, was the lone dissenter, saying he continued to maintain his position that “the death penalty has no place in the jurisprudence of the state of Connecticut” and recommending a life prison sentence for Rizzo.

Rizzo’s public defenders and a state prosecutor who handled Rizzo’s appeal did not immediately return phone messages Monday.

Police said Rizzo confessed that he struck up a conversation with Stanley Edwards IV as the boy rode his bicycle by his house in Waterbury on September 30, 1997. Rizzo was an 18-year-old former Marine at the time. The seventh-grader knew and trusted Rizzo through Rizzo’s job at a video store, and he followed Rizzo into Rizzo’s backyard to hunt snakes, prosecutors said.

Rizzo then told police that he straddled Edwards “like a horse” and hit him 13 times with the three-pound sledgehammer as the boy begged him to stop. Rizzo told police that he simply wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody.

Rizzo was sentenced to death under a 1995 state law that allows jurors in death penalty cases to weigh aggravating factors, such as a crime’s brutality, against mitigating factors, such as abuse a defendant suffered during childhood. A three-judge panel imposed the death sentence on Rizzo in 2005.

He had appealed his conviction on numerous claims including that there was a lack of evidence of an aggravating factor, that the three-judge panel improperly weighed aggravating factors against mitigating factors and that the state’s death penalty law violated both the US and state constitutions.

The Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty does not violate the constitution, which reaffirmed previous similar rulings in the death penalty cases of serial killer Michael Ross, who was executed in 2005, and Daniel Webb, who kidnapped and killed a bank executive in Hartford in 1989 and remains on death row.

Rizzo is one of ten men on Connecticut’s death row.