For Connecticut, at least, the decision late last month by the state Supreme Court most likely spoke the final words in the decades-long death penalty debate.

Ruling 5-2 in Connecticut v. Peeler, the justices rejected a plea from prosecutors to reverse the court's 2015 decision. That leaves in place the 2015 ruling, which found that abolition of the death penalty also applies to those condemned to die before Connecticut outlawed capital punishment in 2012.

The 2012 repeal made Connecticut one of 19 states to end the death penalty. From the moment Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed the law, it was clear that there would be challenges to the capital sentences of the 11 men then on Death Row.

The Day has consistently argued for abolition of capital punishment and for the repeal to apply to those already sentenced. State-sanctioned killing "disproportionately targets minorities, has no deterrent value, cannot be undone if there is a mistake, and is a barbaric act that lowers the state to the level of the killer," the newspaper said in 2014.

One of the previously condemned, Eduardo Santiago, brought the appeal that resulted in 2015’s 4-3 decision that declared his death sentence in a 2000 murder-for-hire unconstitutional.

In asking the court to reverse that decision, prosecutors made their appeal based on a particularly despicable case — Russell Peeler’s death sentence for ordering the 1999 murders of a mother and her 8-year-old son. The boy was to have been a witness against Peeler in another shooting.

The divided court and the effort by prosecutors to revive the death penalty reflect the continuing passionate disagreement as to whether Connecticut's pre-repeal death penalty was unconstitutional, as decided in the Santiago case. It is unquestionably illegal for murders committed since April 25, 2012 to be subject to the death penalty, but the door the legislature left open on past sentences led to the appeals to the Supreme Court.

The court's announcement of the newest decision ends any confusion. It came in a brief opinion that said, in effect, it is premature to revise a decision that is less than a year old. The strongly worded dissents of two justices, Peter T. Zarella and Carmen E. Espinosa, criticized that as insufficient reason for ruling against an appeal in such a vital matter.

Society continues to move away from capital punishment, not only from a sense that the state should not be killing people but also because it has become increasingly unlikely that executions will be carried out in a manner that meets the constitutional requirement to be neither cruel nor unusual. Physicians and drug companies, whose participation used to be a matter of business as usual, now largely refuse to be a part of putting someone to death.

Initiatives like the Innocence Project keep identifying mistakes made in prosecuting crimes, some of which have resulted in executions of people who weren't guilty. That won't happen again in Connecticut.

The end of capital punishment in Connecticut ends one of the great moral and policy debates of our time, setting apart 20th- and 21st-century morals and ethics from the pragmatic, largely unquestioned execution practices of societies in other eras. Connecticut now fully joins most of the world in moving beyond the eye-for-an-eye mentality of the death penalty. In 2015, only four countries had more confirmed judicial-ordered executions than the United States — China, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. When it comes to honoring human rights, that is not good company to keep.

The Connecticut Supreme Court’s Peeler decision May 26 aroused little public debate. This is a sign, perhaps, that the public has largely reached a consensus, at last, not to punish killing with killing.