The Connecticut Supreme Court has rejected a former death row inmate's appeal of one of his murder convictions.
Justices ruled 7-0 Monday that a lower court didn't violate Russell Peeler Jr.'s rights when it refused to order the state to pay for a lawyer of his choice for his 2013 retrial in the 1997 killing of Rudolph Snead Jr. in Bridgeport, after the Supreme Court overturned his conviction.
He was convicted at retrial after the state hired another lawyer and sentenced to 105 years in prison.
Peeler also was convicted in the 1999 killings of an 8-year-old witness in the Snead case and the boy's mother. He was sentenced to death.
The state Supreme Court abolished capital punishment last year — a decision it is reconsidering in Peeler's appeal of the death penalty.
