CONNECTICUT is getting ready for its first execution in over 40 years (maybe) and things are heating up.

A couple of articles...

First, from the gov. in the Middletown Press

A few highlights....

Rell explains her decision to allow Ross execution
By GREGORY B. HLADKY , Capitol Bureau Chief

HARTFORD -- As Connecticut’s death penalty opponents mobilize for a last-ditch effort, Gov. M. Jodi Rell said Tuesday she won’t reconsider her decision to allow Michael Ross to be executed on Jan. 26.

But it is clear that the weight of this issue, of becoming the first Northeastern governor in more than four decades to permit an execution, continues to haunt Rell.

"I was up at 4:15 this morning, not second-guessing but reviewing and rehashing in my mind," Rell said during an impromptu news conference Tuesday.

"Most of the sleep that I have lost has been not so much in worry but in reading," Rell explained. "I’m one of those people that likes to read all the details."

The governor said there was no single factor that led to her refusal to issue a reprieve for Ross, who was convicted of raping and strangling four young women in the 1980s. But she again referred to two letters she received -- one from Ross and the other from Edwin K. Shelley, father of Leslie Shelley, whom Ross murdered in 1984.

"You know, I think he’s a very intelligent person," Rell said of Ross, whose letter to the governor asked her not to stop his execution. "It came across clearly, but it was a letter that was just, I think, devoid of feeling," Rell said.

"I think the thing that struck me in (Shelley’s) letter was (when he said) ‘I want you to think about the terror my daughter must have felt,’ " Rell said.

"I have always been a proponent of the death penalty for those crimes and those cases that are the most heinous, the most reprehensible that you can imagine," Rell said. "Michael Ross fits that bill."