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In March 2012, six state senators and Gov. Dannel Malloy’s criminal justice point person, Michael Lawlor, visited two prisons: Northern Correctional Institution, a “supermax” prison where the men on death row were incarcerated, and MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, the largest maximum security prison in New England. The goal: to convince lawmakers on the fence all Democrats to vote to repeal the death penalty. The legislature had already sent a bill to end capital punishment to the governor’s desk in 2009, but it was vetoed by then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell. Fast forward three years, however, and the math had changed. Several lawmakers were reconsidering their earlier votes, hesitant to go against the wishes of Dr. William Petit, whose wife and two daughters were murdered at their Cheshire home just a few years earlier, in 2007. ....