(CNN) — Connecticut’s Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional Thursday, sparing the lives of 11 convicts who were on death row when the state abolished capital punishment in 2012.
The death row inmates whose lives will be spared include Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, who were convicted of killing a woman and her two daughters in a 2007 home invasion in Cheshire, Connecticut.
The decision stems from the appeal of a defendant whose lawyers argued that execution carried out after the state abolished the death penalty would represent cruel and unusual punishment.
That inmate, Eduardo Santiago, faced the death penalty after being convicted of a murder in West Hartford in 2000.
Connecticut’s highest court voted 4-3 to overturn the death penalty.
In 2012, Gov. Dannel Malloy signed a bill into law that abolished the death penalty, making the state the 17th in the nation to abandon capital punishment and the fifth in five years to usher in a repeal.
“In prospectively abolishing the death penalty, the legislature did not simply express the will of the people that it no longer makes sense to maintain the costly and unsatisfying charade of a capital punishment scheme in which no one ever receives the ultimate punishment,” the Supreme Court ruling said.
The ruling cited what it called “Connecticut’s long, troubled history with capital punishment” and said since capital punishment “fails to comport with our abiding freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, we hold that capital punishment, as currently applied, violates the constitution of Connecticut.”
Hayes and Komisarjevsky were convicted and sentenced to death in a sensational case involving a mother and her daughters.
The two men entered the Petit family home, beat and tied up William Petit and forced Jennifer Hawke-Petit to go to a bank and withdraw $15,000.They then raped and strangled Hawke-Petit, 48, and molested 11-year-old Michaela before tying her and 17-year-old Hayley to their beds and setting the house afire.
The girls died from smoke inhalation. Their father managed to escape from the basement.
