Aside from the disarray by the front door, the renovated home Clarke had bought the previous summer was neatly kept and brightly decorated. The ruling overturned Peeler's death sentences and ordered the lower court to impose a new punishment of life in prison without the possibility of release.The video gave jurors a sense of how Karen Clarke and B.J. The Supreme Court's 5-2 decision in May, which upheld its 2015 ruling, said capital punishment in Connecticut is unconstitutional for everyone. In August 2015, the justices ruled 4-3 to ban capital punishment for all defendants, saying in the majority decision that Connecticut's death penalty no longer fit with societal values and served no valid purpose as punishment. Attorneys for the death-row inmates challenged the law, saying it violated the condemned inmates' constitutional rights. I'm sorry that 16 years later we're back where we started, having spent $1 million or two in the process."Ĭonnecticut abolished the death penalty in April 2012 but made the law prospective, meaning it applied only to new cases and kept in place the death sentences for those already on death row. "And the high point of that career is today getting a. "Probably the lowest point in my professional career is when I stood up with Russell and the jury returned a death sentence," Rademacher, who has represented Peeler for 16 years, said after Friday's hearing. Though the high court also agreed with a challenge by the defense of the trial court's refusal to permit disclosure of a witness' psychiatric records to the jury, the justices said the mistake was harmless and ordered a new sentencing hearing for Peeler in which jurors voted for death. Prosecutors successfully appealed the judge's decision, arguing that the judge should have declared a mistrial instead. A judge then imposed life in prison without the possibility of release. Peeler was convicted of capital felony charges in 2000 but a jury deadlocked on whether to sentence him to death. Days before Peeler was to be tried for the slaying, Clarke and her son were found shot to death in their Bridgeport apartment. Peeler went after the boyfriend a second time, killing him. "But in my view, if imposing consecutive life sentences does nothing more than place an exclamation point signifying this community's condemnation of these dastardly crimes, then it's worth it."Īdrian Peeler, 38, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for his role in the slayings.Īccording to trial testimony, the Peelers ran a lucrative crack cocaine ring and Leroy witnessed an attempt by Peeler to shoot his mother's boyfriend in a drug-money dispute. "Now, I think I agree with the defense in a sense that as a practical matter the relationship of the sentences probably is not going to have much difference given the, you know, sort of cumulative sentences that are imposed to Mr. Rademacher had asked Judge Robert Devlin to run the sentences concurrently. The boy and his mother were slated to testify against the older Peeler at an upcoming murder trial. Peeler was sentenced to death in 2007 after a Superior Court jury in Bridgeport convicted him of ordering his younger brother, Adrian Peeler, to kill Clarke and her son at a Bridgeport apartment. Hayes' accomplice, Joshua Komisarjevsky, is scheduled for resentencing on July 26 in Superior Court in New Haven. Last month a New Haven Superior Court judge sentenced him to six consecutive life sentences without the chance for release. Cheshire home invasion killer Steven Hayes was the first of the formerly condemned to be resentenced.
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