The Superior Court criminal and penalty-phase juries called the 1999 murders of Karen Clarke and her son B.J. Brown, 8, “heinous, cruel, depraved.” Now, Russell Peeler, 42, the former Bridgeport gangster on Death Row, is claiming that capital punishment is “cruel and unusual.” In a case with huge ramifications, especially for the dozen men awaiting lethal injections at the Northern Correctional Center, Peeler’s public defender tomorrow will try to get his client off the hook for trial irregularities; and claim that after the repeal of the state’s death penalty in 2012, no more state-sanctioned deaths should go forward, even though the repeal strictly applies to crimes carried out after the law passed.
An unusual three-hour hearing is scheduled for tomorrow before the state Supreme Court that has generated 361 pages of defense briefs and 430 pages from state prosecutors, plus a 125-page defense reply. “The numerous death-row inmates exonerated by DNA technology and other methodologies have decisively demonstrated that our system of criminal justice is too imprecise an instrument to be used to decide who lives and who dies,” wrote Mark Rademacher, assistant public defender, who will represent Peeler, a crack deal who murdered a former partner with five shots from a Glock .40-caliber handgun in a Boston Avenue barbershop in 1997, then ordered the hit on Clarke and Brown, who had been listed as a witness. “Russell Peeler does not shoot the victims and is not present when they are killed,” Rademacher noted. Both died from multiple gunshot wounds with a .357 magnum, including a head shot to the Read School fourth grader, at the hands of Peeler’s brother Adrian Peeler.
“The case arises from the defendant’s determination to murder anybody who was willing to testify against him for his crimes,” wrote Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Marjorie Allen Dauster, who will stand before the high court tomorrow.
Rademacher said the April, 2012 repeal means that capital punishment “is no longer consistent with standards of decency” in the state. “An execution carried out in the face of this judgment would plainly be cruel and unusual punishment and would violate the statutory prohibition against arbitrary death sentences and numerous constitutional prohibitions against arbitrary criminal laws that are unsupported by legitimate penological objectives,” he claims