Commentary––

State’s Capital Punishment Game May Wear Out Death-Row Prisoner First

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s politicians might have thought it would last forever, but their dishonest compromise about capital punishment may be coming undone.

For decades the idea in Connecticut has been to have capital punishment in theory but never in practice. It would be in the law as a penalty for murder but virtually impossible to impose no matter how horrible the crime, since a death sentence would require a finding that the murder was committed in “an especially heinous, cruel, or depraved manner.” That is, “ordinary” murders wouldn’t qualify.

So most prosecutors didn’t bother seeking a death sentence; it was too much trouble. True, Waterbury State’s Attorney John A. Connelly somehow achieved five of the seven death sentences imposed. (Was it his prosecutorial talent, the bloodthirstiness of the juries in his jurisdiction, the depravity of the murders there, or some of each?) But the glacially paced appeals process postponed implementation of the sentences indefinitely and thereby gave a congressman’s worth of renown to Joseph “Mag Dog” Taborsky, who has been mentioned every other day since 1960 as the last criminal executed in Connecticut.

The almost interminable system, it was figured, would wear out the government. Indeed, opponents of capital punishment argued that attempting it is simply a waste of resources, that achieving an execution would cost far more than locking up a murderer for life without parole.

Of course this argument was less than candid, since the opponents of capital punishment themselves were the ones who sought to drive up its costs even where there wasn’t the slightest doubt about the guilt of the condemned –– as there is not the slightest doubt about the guilt of those on Connecticut’s small death row. (That cannot necessarily be said about the death rows of states that are more enthusiastic about capital punishment).

But in general opponents of capital punishment in Connecticut were happy with their unacknowledged victory and not inclined to press for the surrender of the other side. They preferred to remain discreet rather than seek formal repeal of a statute that seemed as good as repeal or even better, since it was enough to dissuade the governor and other supporters of capital punishment, including a supposed majority of the General Assembly, from doing much to amend the law to achieve executions in at least the worst cases.

Many supporters of capital punishment in Connecticut were happy with the situation, too, since their support was mostly posturing. After all, people may feel that many criminals deserve to die without also necessarily wanting their government to be putting many to death, or even one. Even political conservatives wonder increasingly whether government, over the long term, can be trusted to get capital punishment right.

It is simply a tough issue.

But now the system that was supposed to settle the issue indirectly and almost surreptitiously by wearing out the government may be wearing out a prisoner instead.

Sedrick Cobb, convicted in 1991 of the 1989 rape and murder of a young woman abducted in Waterbury, went into Vernon Superior Court the other day and asked a judge to let him fire his public defenders and withdraw his latest appeal, which makes claims of ineffective counsel at his trial and racial discrimination against members of minority groups in the imposition of death sentences. While Cobb changed his mind a week later, sending a handwritten note to the judge asking to continue his case after all, he had put in an awkward and revealing situation everyone connected with it.

While acknowledging the condemned man’s right to stop appealing, Judge Stanley T. Fuger, Jr, urged Cobb against it, noting that it almost certainly would send him directly to the lethal injection chamber. Cobb assured the court that he had given more thought to it than anyone else had, and even expressed contempt for the racial discrimination claim made on his behalf.

“There’s a continuing hatred that’s being portrayed –– ‘Cobb is raising the race issue,’” Cobb told the court. “Cobb never raised nothing. That was attorneys doing that to incense the public.”

Cobb went on: “Let the officers of the court and false witnesses ... develop a conscience before the court, whatever procedure that is, and admit their wrongdoing and how they have made this carry on and carry on over the years, and me sitting in that pit up there, being told this and that and lies by various attorneys.... I’ve had enough.”

However the people of Connecticut feel about capital punishment, they also might have had enough of the political and legal opportunism around it, the inability of their political and legal processes to decide the issue forthrightly, and the wallowing in contrivances that have nothing to do with actual guilt.

To his own lawyers Cobb has been less a client than a cause. Even Judge Fuger treated him as such in court the other day. “If you withdraw your petition,” the judge told him, “you not only hasten your own death; you well may hasten the deaths of other people.”

Cobb replied that he had heard it all before.

So has Connecticut. If Cobb or another death row prisoner ever again calls the state’s bluff about capital punishment, Connecticut at last may be forced to decide what its law really is. Anyone who accomplished that might almost deserve a reprieve.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)