USA - Connecticut. A new study finds that the death penalty is for those with no luck or bad lawyers.

A new study by Stanford law professor John Donahue studies all murder cases in the state of Connecticut to find reasoning that the death penalty is not usually for the worst offenders but for those with no luck or bad lawyers. Donohuety, who was paid by the office of the state's chief public defender to begin his study 5 years ago, looked at the application of the death penalty between 1973 and 2007, examining and rating 205 cases during a period when 4,686 murders occurred in the state. He reports that the state execution system is highly arbitrary because of the number of murders and the amount of people who are sentenced to the death penalty and even execution. "There is no way to distinguish the few that are singled out for death from the many death-eligible defendants that receive lesser sentences,'' Donohue concludes. "Some judicial districts in the state punish identical crimes drastically differently from those in other parts of the state. The defendant's and victim's races play a crucial role in deciding who is charged with a capital felony and who receives a death sentence.'' Donohue used law students from the University of Connecticut and Yale University to separately analyze and rank the 205 crimes on "egregiousness," considering severity and other factors. A regression analysis to model how the death penalty works found that race and geography "substantially influence" capital punishment in Connecticut. In his study, Donahue shows that 8 out of 9 of the state’s death sentences were not even out of the 15 worst murder cases in the state. During the entire study, only one murder case resulted in an execution. In 2009 the legislature passed a bill to abolish the death penalty, but the bill was vetoed on May 22, 2009 (see).