A new­ly pub­lished study by Professor John Donohue of Stanford Law School found that arbi­trary fac­tors, includ­ing race and geog­ra­phy, sig­nif­i­cant­ly affect­ed death sen­tenc­ing deci­sions in Connecticut. While con­trol­ling for a vari­ety of fac­tors relat­ed to the sever­i­ty of the crime, the study’s abstract indi­cat­ed that “[M]inority defen­dants who kill white vic­tims are cap­i­tal­ly charged at sub­stan­tial­ly high­er rates than minor­i­ty defen­dants who kill minori­ties, [and] that geog­ra­phy influ­ences both cap­i­tal charg­ing and sen­tenc­ing deci­sions .…” For exam­ple, the abstract not­ed, ​“Considering the most com­mon type of death-eli­gi­ble mur­der – a mul­ti­ple vic­tim homi­cide – a white on white mur­der of aver­age egre­gious­ness out­side [the city of] Waterbury has a .57 per­cent chance of being sen­tenced to death, while a minor­i­ty com­mit­ting the iden­ti­cal crime on white vic­tims in Waterbury would face a 91.2 per­cent like­li­hood.” The sec­ond defen­dant is 160 times more like­ly to be sen­tenced to death than the first. The study con­clud­ed, “[I]n part because of the strong racial, geo­graph­ic, and gen­der influ­ences on cap­i­tal out­comes in Connecticut, the state’s death penal­ty sys­tem has not been suc­cess­ful at lim­it­ing the death penal­ty with­in the class of death-eli­gi­ble crimes to the worst of the worst offend­ers or estab­lish­ing that there is a prin­ci­pled basis for dis­tin­guish­ing the few death-eli­gi­ble defen­dants that will be sen­tenced to death in Connecticut from the many who will not.”

Connecticut abol­ished the death penal­ty for future offens­es in 2012, leav­ing its death row pop­u­la­tion in place.

(J. Donohue, ​“An Empirical Evaluation of the Connecticut Death Penalty System Since 1973: Are There Unlawful Racial, Gender, and Geographic Disparities?,” 11 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (forth­com­ing, Dec. 2014); DPIC post­ed Aug. 15, 2014). See Arbitrariness and Studies.

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