Hearings still awaited on death penalty bias

HARTFORD -- A two-year-old order by the state Supreme Court for hearings to determine if Connecticut's death penalty is biased stands unfulfilled less than a week before New England's first scheduled execution in 45 years.

The court appointed former chief justice Robert J. Callahan in 2003 to arrange hearings on assertions that there is racial and geographic discrimination in the use of the death penalty. However, no hearings have been scheduled and a new judge has been ordered to assist after Callahan, 74, asked to be relieved because of health issues.

Superior Court Judge George Levine said he's acquainting himself with the cases. ''I don't even know the size of the universe yet," he said.

Serial killer Michael Ross, 45, is scheduled to die by injection Friday morning. He was convicted of murdering four women in the early 1980s and has confessed to eight murders in Connecticut and New York.

Ross hasn't claimed the death penalty is biased and has fought to expedite his execution by forgoing his appeals. But death penalty opponents and at least two state Supreme Court justices say the claims are relevant to Ross's case.

Should the courts ''conclude that our entire death penalty system is fundamentally flawed as discriminatory on the basis of race after the defendant has been executed, our Judicial Branch as a bastion of civil rights might suffer irreparable harm," Justice Flemming Norcott Jr. wrote in a January dissent of a decision that found Ross competent to ''volunteer" for execution.

Antonio Ponvert III, a lawyer for Ross's father, Dan, said that if the appeals had been heard earlier, the sentences of everyone on death row may have been commuted to life in prison.

''I really don't understand how anybody, the court, the state's attorney's office, the AG's office, anybody can be contemplating killing Michael Ross at a time when the constitutionality of the entire death penalty scheme in Connecticut is under review," he said.