HARTFORD, Connecticut (AFP) — Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell vetoed a bill Friday that would have abolished the death penalty in the northeastern US state.
Announcing the veto, Rell, a Republican, said that she understood it was an issue which "evokes the deeply held passions of individuals on both sides."
But she had made clear her intention to veto the bill, saying earlier that "there are certain crimes so heinous, so fundamentally revolting to our humanity, that the death penalty is warranted."
The state Senate voted to abolish the death penalty on a tight 19-17 vote May 22 after bitter debate ending only at 04:00 am. The lower house passed the measure by 90-56.
The Connecticut legislature, which is controlled by Democrats, is not expected to be able to muster the two-thirds majority needed in each chamber to override the veto.
The bill would have made life in prison without parole the harshest sentence. There are currently 10 men on death row in Connecticut but the law would not have been retroactive.
Thirty-five out of the 50 US states currently allow executions. Connecticut reinstituted capital punishment in 1973 but has since put only one man to death.
In the mid-1990s an overwhelming majority of Americans backed the death penalty and 326 defendants were sentenced to death in one year. But that support has been eroded by the ever-growing cost of capital cases and a number of high-profile exonerations based on DNA evidence.
In 2007 115 people were sentenced to death nationwide, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and in the last three years, three more states have abolished it.
Some death penalty proponents argue the way to deal with ballooning legal costs is to cut back on the appeals process. Bills have been proposed in Connecticut that would limit those appeals.
Critics counter that much of the extra legal costs of death penalty cases is not in the appeals, but the trials.
Worries raised by death penalty opponents in Connecticut include well-documented racial and geographic disparities in its implementation, the fact of innocent people condemned to death, and the financial costs.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Catholic Bishops of Connecticut, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, criminal defense lawyers in Connecticut and other death penalty opponents had urged the governor to sign the abolition.
But William Petit -- a Connecticut doctor whose wife and three daughters were terrorized and brutally murdered in 2007 -- spoke powerfully at a public hearing in support of executions.
He called putting murderers in prison for life "immoral," and said this "trivializes the victim and the victim's family."
The United Nations has called for a worldwide moratorium on executions with the aim of building worldwide consensus for abolition.
In 91 countries it is outlawed, including in most European countries, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, and Australia.
According to human rights organization Amnesty International, 95 percent of known executions in 2008 took place in six countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Pakistan and Iraq.
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