Good News

[Content Note: Death penalty.]

Tenatively good news, anyway:

After a sweeping two-year review, the state Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment in Connecticut Thursday, saying the state's death penalty no longer comports with evolved societal values and serves no valid purpose as punishment.

The 4-3 decision would remove 11 convicts from Connecticut's death row and overturn the latest iteration of the state's death penalty, a political compromise effective April 2012 that halted executions going forward but allowed death sentences to be imposed on the inmates already sentenced.

The decision, however, was not unanimous, and was, expectedly, met with lots of pushback from death penalty proponents. The state legislature may try to find a way to reinstate it. Which is just unimaginably cruel to the prisoners who are being removed from death row. But there you go. Advocates for the death penalty aren't exactly known for their compassion.

I don't mean that to sound flippant about that. I have immense sympathy for people whose loved ones have been murdered and who feel that the only befitting punishment is the death penalty. It's just, you know, 139 people have been exonerated from death row in my lifetime. (And that statistic is now five years old, so it's certainly gone up since.) Even if one doesn't have any qualms about state-sanctioned killing of murderers, I'm pretty sure we all have qualms about killing innocent people who have been wrongly convicted.

And the only way to keep supporting the death penalty is to pretend those people don't exist.

They do.