The recent 19 – 17 vote in the Connecticut Senate to abol­ish the death penal­ty was made pos­si­ble by three sen­a­tors who moved from sup­port­ing the death penal­ty to oppos­ing it. Sen. Gary LeBeau had long favored the death penal­ty, part­ly because of ​“polit­i­cal cal­cu­la­tions.” His stance shift­ed in the last cou­ple of years wit­ness­ing a series of high-pro­file exon­er­a­tions of inno­cent peo­ple. At 61, LeBeau, a retired school­teacher, came to view life as a gift, one ​“we should­n’t take away from any­body … in the name of the peo­ple of Connecticut. It’s not our right to take away a per­son­’s life.” Joining LeBeau’s change of heart were Senators Andrea Stillman and Edith Prague. Prague said, ​“I always believed if some­one was so cru­el to take some­one else’s life … they deserve it. Then along came Mr. Tillman,” Prague said, refer­ring to James Tillman, an inno­cent man who served 18 years for a crime before he was exon­er­at­ed on the basis of new DNA evi­dence. ​“I know that the mis­take made [was] hor­ren­dous,” she said. ​“My sense is that the jus­tice sys­tem makes mis­takes.” Sen. Stillman had first vot­ed in sup­port of the death penal­ty in 1995, but now says, ​“The world was dif­fer­ent then,” and believes her own grad­ual shift in opin­ion mir­rors that of her con­stituents. Connecticut’s House vot­ed 90 – 56 to abol­ish cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as well, but Governor Jodi Rell has indi­cat­ed she will veto the bill.

(D. Altimari, ​“3 Minds Change on Death Penalty, Make Difference,” The Hartford Courant, May 24, 2009). See Recent Legislative Activity and New Voices.

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