Radiofree West Hartford - CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN CONNECTICUT by Tim Siggia

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN CONNECTICUT

By Tim Siggia

May 14, 2005

On the eerily appropriate day of Friday the 13th, 2005, the first execution in New England in 45 years took place in Connecticut at the Robinson Correctional Center in Somers. Michael Bruce Ross, 45, convicted serial killer of at least six women, died by a series of three lethal injections administered at 2:01 a.m. Ross was pronounced dead at 2:25 a.m.

Ross's crimes were of the most heinous kind. He methodically raped, then murdered his victims. He was tried by a jury and found guilty of six of those murders, and sentenced to death by due process in 1987. Governor M. Jodi Rell refused to commute that sentence earlier this year, after a litany of unsuccessful appeals by Ross's attorneys. Ross himself admitted to the murders, and on numerous occasions publicly stated that he deserved death and wished to die, waiving his rights to appeal. Why, then, did it take eighteen years for this convicted rapist-murder to finally be executed?

The answer to this question can be found mainly, if not totally, in one word: liberals.

The last execution in New England also took place in Connecticut in May of 1960, when Joseph "Mad Dog" Taborsky died by electrocution. The electric chair has since been replaced by lethal injection, which most experts agree is a far more humane method -- but not humane enough to satisfy liberals, for whom any form of capital punishment tends to be seen as "cruel and unusual." The same people who have no compunction whatsoever about butchering unborn children to death for the sake of convenience, or starving to death an innocent woman whose only crime was to be brain-damaged, recoil with howls at the plight of a serial killer receiving a lethal injection.

Connecticut is a curious place. As in most other states, people here desire justice, and in numerous polls most Connecticut residents favored both keeping the death penalty and administering that duly sentenced penalty to Michael Ross. But this is also Liberal Connecticut, where the blue-state mentality inevitably makes its presence known. As Ross awaited his execution, protesters abounded outside. Some merely carried symbolic candles in silence. Other, more militant types, carried signs, at least one of which read, "This Is Not Texas Or Florida." The arrogant, holier-than-thou implications of this statement were apparently lost on the sign carrier.

The seemingly interminable saga of Michael Ross is now finally over, but the battle over capital punishment in Connecticut will continue. Bills will be introduced into the legislature to end the practice, as they have been in the past. Most if not all of the remaining New England states have already abolished the death penalty, and pressure will be put on Connecticut from both without and within to join their ranks.

This writer has a proposition for those liberals who believe the death penalty to be cruel and barbaric. I'll be willing to join you on that, but with one stipulation: let's do away with ALL state-sanctioned premeditated killing. If we abolish capital punishment, let us outlaw abortion as well. Those liberals to whom I have made this proposal have so far responded with silence.

As might be expected.