Connecticut Superior Court Judge Stanley T. Fuger ruled on February 27 that a suit alleg­ing racial and geo­graph­ic bias in the state’s death penal­ty should not be dis­missed. Judge Fuger is allow­ing the claim from sev­en death row inmates to con­tin­ue because the state’s con­sti­tu­tion gives defen­dants greater legal rights than the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court had reject­ed a sim­i­lar claim about Georgia’s death penal­ty in 1987 based on fed­er­al con­sti­tu­tion­al grounds.

In his rul­ing on a motion to dis­miss from the state, Judge Fuger wrote:

In the instant case, the peti­tion­ers allege that they are to be deprived of their lives in a pro­ceed­ing that has been taint­ed by the impo­si­tion of improp­er racial deter­mi­na­tions. The stakes are, there­fore, extra­or­di­nar­i­ly high for these peti­tion­ers and mer­it the clos­est of scruti­ny before throw­ing the com­plaint out of court with­out any oppor­tu­ni­ty to pro­vide the valid­i­ty of the claims.

David Baldus, a pro­fes­sor at the University of Iowa College of Law whose research on racial and geo­graph­ic bias in the death penal­ty was the sub­ject of the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court rul­ing, told the Hartford Courant, ​“Connecticut is not clos­ing its eyes to this claim as most state courts have done. So that’s why this is an unusu­al case. Unusual and impor­tant.”

The Connecticut claim is based on a study by Yale Law School Professor John Donohue find­ing that the cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem is arbi­trary and capri­cious; non-white defen­dants are treat­ed more harsh­ly than white defen­dants, espe­cial­ly in cas­es with white vic­tims. The heinous­ness of the under­ly­ing mur­ders seems to play a minor role in deter­min­ing who is sen­tenced to death, both with­in and across judi­cial dis­tricts.
(“Death Penalty May Be Tested,” by Katie Malone, The Hartford Courant, February 28, 2008). See Race and Arbitrariness.

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