Death Row Inmates Attend Hearing


By Karen Florin ,



Published on 12/14/2007
Five death row inmates spent the morning in the gymnasium at Northern Correctional Institution on Thursday as attorneys for the state and the inmates argued the claim that the death penalty is applied unfairly along racial lines.
The inmates, separated from one another by office partitions and outfitted with microphones in case they wanted to speak, wore neon yellow jumpsuits and were in full restraints at the request of Judge Stanley T. Fuger Jr. Two inmates, Sedrick Cobb and Todd Rizzo, opted not to attend the hearing. Some 13 miles away, members of the press watched the three-hour proceeding via live video feed at Rockville Superior Court.
The hearing was precipitated by the state Supreme Court's order that the individual racial disparity claims of the death row inmates be consolidated at a habeas corpus hearing.
In general, the state contends the racial disparity claims are a delaying tactic while the public defenders who represent the condemned killers point to a recent Yale study that says black defendants are sentenced to death three times more often than white defendants. The study also indicates that minorities convicted of killing whites are more likely to receive a death sentence. Four of the state's death row inmates are black, three are white and two are Hispanic.
None of the inmates spoke during the hearing. From the reporters' perspective in Rockville, only one inmate, Robert Courchesne, was visible as he sat several feet behind the lawyers' podium in the gymnasium. Courchesne, who is white, killed a pregnant African American woman in Waterbury over a drug debt in 1998, The unborn baby of Demetris Rodgers was delivered by emergency Caesarean, but died a month later.
Senior Assistant State's Attorney John Massameno, arguing on his motion to dismiss the racial disparity claims, said Sedrick Cobb made the first claim in 1991. Cobb, a black man, had been sentenced to death that year for the 1989 kidnap, sexual assault and murder of Julia Ashe, a white woman.
The claims have been heard, rejected and reasserted several times by Cobb and other inmates. Judges have been appointed as “special masters” to move the claims along and in 2003, defense attorneys produced a study they said supported their claim but was never made public. Massameno detailed the myriad of continuances that occurred between 2003 and the publication of the recent study.
“In capital litigation, often the strategy used by those representing defendants sentenced to death is delay, because delay is winning,” Massameno said. The state, he added, does not want to “rush to judgment,” but said the years of delay are egregious. He also cited flaws in the current study and said it is not statistically sound.
Speaking on behalf of all the defendants, Attorney David Golub said the delays were justified and explained the process of assembling the report, which included visiting each of the state's 13 judicial districts to get information on homicides, trying to identify the protocol that made a defendant eligible for the death penalty, coding the cases, studying pre-sentence reports and compiling a database. He defended the current study, in which Yale Professor John Donohue evaluated 4,600 murders between 1973 and 2007.
Judge Fuger asked the state's attorney to submit a brief in the case by Jan. 11 and is then expected to rule on the case within 120 days.
The hearing came on the same day that New Jersey legislators voted to abolish the death penalty in their state. Executions are few and far between in Connecticut, where the last person put to death was serial killer Michael Ross in 2005. Ross, who was white, had given up his legal battle and willingly accepted lethal injection.
Ross was the only inmate put to death since capital punishment was reinstated in Connecticut in 1973. Other executions have been delayed for decades while appeals are argued in various courts. In a few cases, the courts have overturned the death sentence.