Prosecutors successfully appealed the judge’s decision, arguing that the judge should have declared a mistrial instead. A judge then imposed life in prison without the possibility of release. Peeler was convicted of capital felony charges in 2000 but a jury deadlocked on whether to sentence him to death. Days before Peeler was to be tried for the slaying, Clarke and her son were found shot to death in their Bridgeport apartment. Peeler went after the boyfriend a second time, killing him. “But in my view, if imposing consecutive life sentences does nothing more than place an exclamation point signifying this community’s condemnation of these dastardly crimes, then it’s worth it.”Īdrian Peeler, 38, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for his role in the slayings.Īccording to trial testimony, the Peelers ran a lucrative crack cocaine ring and Leroy witnessed an attempt by Peeler to shoot his mother’s boyfriend in a drug-money dispute. “Now, I think I agree with the defense in a sense that as a practical matter the relationship of the sentences probably is not going to have much difference given the, you know, sort of cumulative sentences that are imposed to Mr. Rademacher had asked Judge Robert Devlin to run the sentences concurrently. The boy and his mother were slated to testify against the older Peeler at an upcoming murder trial. Peeler was sentenced to death in 2007 after a Superior Court jury in Bridgeport convicted him of ordering his younger brother, Adrian Peeler, to kill Clarke and her son at a Bridgeport apartment. Hayes’ accomplice, Joshua Komisarjevsky, is scheduled for resentencing on July 26 in Superior Court in New Haven. Last month a New Haven Superior Court judge sentenced him to six consecutive life sentences without the chance for release. The law addressing those inmates, put in place when the death penalty was repealed in 2012, will likely keep the former death-row inmates away from the general prison population and locked up in maximum-security facilities.Ĭheshire home invasion killer Steven Hayes was the first of the formerly condemned to be resentenced.

Peeler’s attorney, Mark Rademacher, elaborated on behalf of Peeler saying there is a brewing controversy about the conditions under which the former death row inmates will be held, an issue he said he expects will be litigated but that he did not want to argue at Friday’s hearing.Ĭorrections officials last month told The Courant they are working to adjust their prison housing directives to comply with a state law regarding the incarceration of former death-row inmates and those now convicted of the crime of murder with special circumstances. Northern, where death row was housed, is Connecticut’s super-maximum security prison.

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