Connecticut abolished capital punishment in April 2012. That made Connecticut the 17th state in this country to do so and the fifth state to end the death penalty after 2010.
Soon, the state will have a chance to do what no other abolitionist state has done. In its next legislative session, Connecticut will consider a bill that would ban the sale of drugs or materials for use in an execution by any business in the state.
Two state legislators, Sen. Saud Anwar and Rep. Joshua Elliott, are leading this effort. As they argue: “This legislation is the logical and moral extension of our commitment to end capital punishment in our state. We do not believe in the death penalty for us here in Connecticut, and we will not support it anywhere else.”
This is not the first time the Nutmeg State has tried to lead the way in the campaign to end America’s death penalty.
At the time it abolished capital punishment, its new law only prevented any new death sentences from being imposed. It left 11 men on the state’s death row awaiting execution.
Three years later, in 2015, the state Supreme Court decided by a 4–3 vote that applying the death penalty only for past cases was unconstitutional. Writing for the majority, Justice Richard Palmer wrote, “We are persuaded that, following its prospective abolition, this state’s death penalty no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency and no longer serves any legitimate penological purpose.”
The court found that it would be “cruel and unusual” to keep anyone on death row in a state that had “determined that the machinery of death is irreparable or, at the least, unbecoming to a civilized modern state.”
With this decision, not only did Connecticut get out of the execution business, but it also appeared at the time that the court’s decision would, as the New York Times put it, “influence high courts in other states … where capital punishment has recently been challenged under the theory that society’s mores have evolved, transforming what was once an acceptable step into an unconstitutional punishment.”
In fact, courts in Colorado and Washington soon followed the Connecticut example. At that point, it seemed that Connecticut’s involvement with the death penalty had come to an end.
Now, Anwar and Elliott are asking the state to again take the lead in trying to stop executions in states where the death penalty has not yet been abolished. The legislation they plan to introduce would, if passed, “prevent any Connecticut-based corporation from supplying drugs or other tools for executions.”
Before examining the rationale for this novel idea, let’s examine why it would be so significant. The recent history of lethal injection offers important clues.
From 1982, when the first execution by lethal injection was carried out, until 2009, every one of those executions proceeded using the same three-drug protocol. It involved a sedative, a paralytic, and a drug to stop the heart.
However, the post-2009 period witnessed the unraveling of the original lethal injection paradigm with its three-drug protocol. By 2016, no states were employing it. Instead, they were executing people with a variety of novel drugs or drug combinations.
The shift from one dominant drug protocol to many was made possible by the advent of a new legal doctrine that granted states wide latitude to experiment with their drugs. This doctrine began with a decision that said that legislatures could take whatever “steps they deem appropriate … to ensure humane capital punishment.”
Subsequently, developments in Europe and the United States made it very difficult for death penalty states to get reliable supplies of drugs for lethal injection. This was the result of efforts by groups like the British anti–death penalty group Reprieve, which launched its Stop Lethal Injection Project and targeted pharmaceutical companies and other suppliers of lethal injection drugs.
Companies selling drugs for executions found themselves on the receiving end of a shaming campaign. As a EuroNews report notes, in 2011, the European pharmaceutical company Lundbeck decided to stop distributing the drug pentobarbital “to prisons in U.S. states currently carrying out the death penalty by lethal injection.”
Later that year, the European Union banned the export of drugs that could be used for “capital punishment, torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” EuroNews explains that “among the drugs that the EU banned in 2011 was sodium thiopental, another drug commonly used in US lethal injections as part of a three-drug method of execution.”
Around the same time, Hospira, an American company that produced sodium thiopental, issued a press release announcing that it had “decided to exit the market.” It did so, according to EuroNews, “amidst pressure from Italian authorities as the company’s production plant was based there.”
In 2016, as the New York Times notes, “the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced … that it had imposed sweeping controls on the distribution of its products to ensure that none are used in lethal injections, a step that closes off the last remaining open-market source of drugs used in executions.” That brought to 20 the number of American and European drug companies that have adopted such restrictions, citing either moral or business reasons.
The result was that death penalty states had to improvise to get the execution drugs they needed. As Maya Foa, who tracks drug companies for Reprieve, explained, “Executing states must now go underground if they want to get hold of medicines for use in lethal injection.”
By the end of 2020, states had used at least 10 distinct drug protocols in their executions. Some protocols were used multiple times, and some were used just once. Even so, the traditional three-drug protocol was all but forgotten: Its last use was in 2012.
Other death penalty states, like Alabama, have adopted new methods of execution. A few have revived previously discredited methods. Some, like Ohio, have stopped executing anyone, although the death penalty remains on the books.
This brings us back to Connecticut.
In an op-ed published in April of this year, Anwar and Elliott pointed out that Absolute Standards, a drug manufacturer based in their state, was supplying the execution drug pentobarbital to the federal government and other states. Pentobarbital, either alone or in combination with other drugs, has become a popular alternative to the traditional three-drug cocktail.
“Thanks to Absolute Standards, in his last year in office, Donald Trump was able to end a 17-year hiatus on federal executions and carry out a horrifying spree of 13 executions,” Anwar and Elliott wrote. “The company supplied the Trump administration pentobarbital, a drug that, when used in excess to kill, induces suffering akin to drowning.”
“Absolute Standards,” they explain, “is not a pharmaceutical corporation—it’s a chemical company that makes solution for machines. That’s why it’s flown under the radar since it began producing and supplying lethal injection drugs in 2018.”
Anwar and Elliott’s innovation in the campaign to end capital punishment has already paid dividends. Last week, the Intercept reported that the president of Absolute Standards told the publication that his company had stopped manufacturing pentobarbital.
However, the two legislators are going forward with their plan to introduce their bill during the 2025 legislative session.
As Anwar says, “I think that laws last longer than legislators and issues, and I feel that irrespective of [Absolute Standard’s] commitment, I am interested in having a law in the future … to make sure that we don’t have another similar situation that we learn about indirectly or directly five years, 10 years, 20 years from now.”
Connecticut should adopt the Anwar/Elliott proposal, and legislators in other abolitionist states should follow suit. They should prohibit pharmaceutical corporations, gas suppliers, medical equipment manufacturers, and other businesses in their states from letting their products and services be used in executions. If they do not believe that the death penalty is right for their state, they should not support it anywhere else.
Legislators in abolitionist states should use their power to block businesses from disseminating the instrumentalities of death. They should join Anwar and Elliott in saying, “There is no profit worth a human life.”
It’s a scheme made famous by a nearly 30-year-old episode of the sitcom Seinfeld.
Hoping to earn a quick buck, two characters load a mail truck full of soda bottles and beer cans purchased with a redeemable 5-cent deposit in New York, before traveling to Michigan, where they can be recycled for 10 cents apiece. With few thousand cans, they calculate, the trip will earn a decent profit. In the end, the plan fell apart.
But after Connecticut raised the value of its own bottle deposits to 10 cents in 2024, officials say, they were caught off guard by a flood of such fraudulent returns coming in from out of state. Redemption rates have reached 97%, and some beverage distributors have reported millions of dollars in losses as a result of having to pay out for excess returns of their products.
On Thursday, state lawmakers passed an emergency bill to crack down on illegal returns by increasing fines, requiring redemption centers to keep track of bulk drop-offs and allowing local police to go after out-of-state violators.
“I’m heartbroken,” said House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, who supported the effort to increase deposits to 10 cents and expand the number of items eligible for redemption. “I spent a lot of political capital to get the bottle bill passed in 2021, and never in a million years did I think that New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island residents would return so many bottles.”
The legislation, Senate Bill 299, would increase fines for violating the bottle bill law from $50 to $500 on a first offense. For third and subsequent offenses, the penalty would increase from $250 to $2,000 and misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison.
In addition, it requires redemption centers to be licensed by the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (previously, those businesses were only required to register with DEEP). As a condition of their license, redemption centers must keep records of anyone seeking to redeem more than 1,000 bottles and cans in a single day.
Anyone not affiliated with a qualified nonprofit would be prohibited from redeeming more than 4,000 bottles a day, down from the previous limit of 5,000.
The bill also seeks to pressure some larger redemption centers into adopting automated scanning technologies, such as reverse vending machines, by temporarily lowering the handling fee that is paid on each beverage container processed by those centers.
The bill easily passed the Senate on Wednesday and the House on Thursday on its way to Gov. Ned Lamont.
While the bill drew bipartisan support, Republicans described it as a temporary fix to a growing problem.
House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, called the switch to 10-cent deposits an “unmitigated disaster” and said he believed out-of-state redemption centers were offloading much of their inventory within Connecticut.
“The sheer quantity that is being redeemed in the state of Connecticut, this isn’t two people putting cans into a post office truck,” Candelora said. “This is far more organized than that.”
The impact of those excess returns is felt mostly by the state’s wholesale beverage distributors, who initiate the redemption process by collecting an additional 10 cents on every eligible bottle and can they sell to supermarkets, liquor stores and other retailers within Connecticut. The distributors are required to pay that money back — plus a handling fee — once the containers are returned to the store or a redemption center.
According to the state’s Department of Revenue Services, nearly 12% of wholesalers reported having to pay out more redemptions than they collected in deposits in 2025. Those losses totaled $11.3 million.
Peter Gallo, the vice president of Star Distributors in West Haven, said his company’s losses alone have totaled more than $2 million since the increase on deposits went into effect two years ago. As time goes on, he said, the deficit has only grown.
“We’re hoping we can get something fixed here, because it’s a tough pill to be holding on to debt that we should get paid for,” Gallo said.
Still, officials say they have no way of tracking precisely how many of the roughly 2 billion containers that were redeemed in the state last year were illegally brought in from other states. That’s because most products lack any kind of identifiable marking indicating where they were sold.
“There’s no way to tell right now. That’s one of the core issues here,” said state Rep. John-Michael Parker, D-Madison, who co-chairs the legislature’s Environment Committee.
Parker said the issue could be solved if product labels were printed with a specific barcode or other feature that would be unique to Connecticut. Such a solution, for now, has faced technological challenges and pushback from the beverage industry, he said.
Not everyone involved in the handling, sorting and redemption of bottles is happy about the upcoming changes — or the process by which they were approved.
Francis Bartolomeo, the owner of a Fran’s Cans and Bart’s Bottles in Watertown, said he was only made aware of the legislation on Monday from a fellow redemption center owner. Since then, he said, he’s been contacting his legislators to oppose the bill and was frustrated by the lack of a public hearing.
“I know other people are as flabbergasted as I am because they don’t know where it comes out of,” Bartolomeo said “It’s a one sided affair, really.”
Bartolomeo said one of his biggest concerns with the bill is the $2,500 annual licensing fee that it would place on redemption centers. While he agreed that out-of-state redemptions are a problem, he said it should be up to the state to improve enforcement.
“We’re cleaning up the mess, and we’re going to end up being penalized,” Bartolomeo said. “Get rid of it and go back to 5 cents if it’s that big of a hindrance, but don’t penalize the redemption centers for what you imposed.”
Lynn Little of New Milford Redemption Center supports the increased penalties but believes the solution ultimately lies with better labeling by the distributors. She is also frustrated by the volume caps after the state initially gave grants to residents looking to open their own bottle redemption businesses.
“They’re taking a volume business, because any business where you make 3 cents per unit (the average handling fee) is a volume business, and limiting the volume we can take in, you’re crushing small businesses,” Little said.
Ritter said that he opposed a move back to the 5-cent deposit, which he noted was increased to encourage recycling. However, he said the current situation has become politically untenable and puts the state at risk of a lawsuit from distributors.
“We’re getting to a point where we’re going to lose the bottle bill,” Ritter said. “If we got sued in court, I think we’d lose.”
NEW BRITAIN, CT — Stanley Black & Decker on Thursday said it has decided to close its manufacturing facility in New Britain.
Debora Raymond, vice president of external communications for the manufacturer, said the decision is a result of a “structural decline in demand for single-sided tape measures.”
The New Britain facility predominantly makes these products, according to Raymond.
“These products are quickly becoming obsolete in the markets we serve,” Raymond said, via an emailed statement Thursday.
The decision is expected to impact approximately 300 employees, according to Raymond.
“We are focused on supporting impacted employees through this transition, including providing options for employment at other facilities, severance, and job placement support services for both salaried and hourly employees,” Raymond said.
As of Thursday at 4:30 p.m., no Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notice had been filed with the state Department of Labor.
The company’s corporate headquarters remains at 1000 Stanley Dr., New Britain.
Gov. Ned Lamont released the following statement on the decision:
“Although Stanley has made the decision to discontinue operations for manufacturing outdated products, a change in workforce opportunities is difficult for employees, their families, and any community.,” Lamont said. “However, I am hopeful that these skilled workers will be repurposed with the help of Stanley Black & Decker, a company that will still proudly be headquartered here in Connecticut. My administration is working closely with local and state leaders to support affected workers and to reimagine the factory site so it can continue to create opportunity and strengthen New Britain’s economic future.”
New Britain Mayor Bobby Sanchez said he is “deeply disappointed” the company will be closing its Myrtle Street operations.
“For generations, Stanley Works has been part of the fabric of our city, providing good-paying jobs, supporting families, and helping build New Britain’s proud reputation as the ‘Hardware City,’” Sanchez said.
According to the mayor, his office’s immediate focus is on helping affected workers and their families. The mayor has been in contact with Lamont’s office, and they will be working closely to make sure employees have access to job placement services, retraining opportunities and support, Sanchez said.
“We will continue aggressively pursuing economic development opportunities and attracting businesses that are looking for a true community partner, a city ready to collaborate, innovate and grow alongside them,” Sanchez said. “New Britain has reinvented itself before, and we will do so again.”
Stanley Black & Decker, founded in 1843, operates manufacturing facilities worldwide, according to its website. It reports having 43,500 employees globally, and makes an array of products, such as power tools and equipment, hand tools, and fasteners.
Newly released police video shows former WWE executive Vince McMahon ram his luxury sports car into the rear end of another vehicle on a Connecticut highway last summer as he was being followed by a state trooper.
McMahon, now 80, was driving his 2024 Bentley Continental GT at more than 100 mph on the Merritt Parkway when he crashed in the town of Westport, according to state police.
A trooper’s dashcam video shows McMahon accelerating away, then braking too late to avoid crashing into the back of a BMW. The Bentley then swerves into a guardrail and careens back across the highway, creating a cloud of dirt and car parts.
“Why were you driving all over 100 mph?” state police Detective Maxwell Robins asked McMahon after catching up to the wrecked Bentley, which can cost over $300,000.
“I got my granddaughter’s birthday” McMahon replied, explaining he was on his way to see her. The encounter was recorded on police bodycam video.
No one was seriously injured in the July 24 crash, which happened the same day that WWE legend Hulk Hogan died of a heart attack in Florida.
Besides damage to the rear of the BMW, another vehicle driving on the opposite side of the parkway was struck by flying debris. The driver of that third car happened to be wearing a WWE shirt, according to the police video.
McMahon was cited for reckless driving and following too closely. A state judge in October allowed McMahon to enter a pretrial probation program that will result in the charges being erased from his record next October if he successfully completes the program. He was also ordered to make a $1,000 charitable contribution.
McMahon’s lawyer, Mark Sherman, said the crash was just an accident.
“Not every car accident is a crime,” Sherman said. “Vince’s primary concern during this case was for the other drivers and is appreciative that the court saw this more of an accident than a crime that needed to be prosecuted.”
State police said Robins was trying to catch up to McMahon on the parkway and clock his speed before pulling him over. They said the incident was not a pursuit, which happens when police chase someone trying to flee officers. They also said it did not appear McMahon was trying to escape — though in the video the detective suggests otherwise.
“I’m trying to catch up to you and you keep taking off,” Robins says.
“No, no no. I’m not trying to outrun you,” McMahon says.
An accident information summary provided to the media shortly after the crash did not mention that a trooper was following McMahon.
The Associated Press obtained the videos Wednesday through a public records request. They were first obtained by The Sun newspaper.
The trooper’s bodycam video also shows him asking McMahon whether he was looking at his phone when the crash happened. McMahon said he was not and adds that he hadn’t driven his car in a long time.
After Robins tells McMahon that his car is fast, McMahon replies, “Yeah, too (expletive) fast.”
The videos also show McMahon talking to the driver he rear-ended. Barbara Doran, of New York City, told the AP last summer that McMahon expressed his concern for her and was glad she was OK. She said she was heading to a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard at the time of the crash.
After McMahon was given the traffic summons, he shook hands with Robins and another trooper and they wished him well.
McMahon stepped down as WWE’s CEO in 2022 amid a company investigation into sexual misconduct allegations. He also resigned as executive chairman of the board of directors of TKO Group Holdings, the parent company of WWE, in 2024, a day after a former WWE employee filed a sexual abuse lawsuit against him. McMahon has denied the allegations. The lawsuit remains pending.
McMahon bought what was then the World Wrestling Federation in 1982 and transformed it from a regional wrestling company into a worldwide phenomenon. Besides running the company with his wife, Linda, who is now the U.S. education secretary, he also performed at WWE events as himself.
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