(AFP) New York – However, it would still allow the state to execute the 11 men currently on death row, a compromise struck by the Democratic majority, which supported the bill, and Republicans who opposed it.
The years-long effort to repeal the death penalty in Connecticut has been been shadowed by a shocking 2007 triple murder, and the often tense debate on the House floor lasted more than nine hours, according to the Hartford Courant.
“This vote tonight literally allows Connecticut to break with a centuries-old tradition of executing people and rejoin the rest of the Western world,” it quoted Benjamin Todd Jealous, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights group, as saying.