Hartford (AP) - The Connecticut Supreme Court on Monday upheld the state's death penalty law and the death sentence of a man who killed a 13-year-old boy with a sledgehammer in 1997.

Both decisions came in the appeal of 33-year-old death row inmate Todd Rizzo, whose lawyers challenged the death penalty on constitutional and other grounds.

The high court issued a 6-1 decision rejecting all of Rizzo's arguments. Justice Flemming L. Norcott Jr., was the lone dissenter, saying he continued to believe that "the death penalty has no place in the jurisprudence of the state of Connecticut" and recommending a life prison sentence for Rizzo.

The ruling came as a state jury in New Haven hears evidence on whether Joshua Komisarjevsky should get the death penalty for killing a woman and her two daughters in a 2007 home invasion in Cheshire. A decision striking down capital punishment in the state could have had implications in Komisarjevsky's case, legal experts say.

Rizzo confessed that he struck up a conversation with Stanley Edwards IV as the boy rode his bicycle by Rizzo's house in Waterbury on Sept. 30, 1997. Rizzo was an 18-year-old former Marine at the time. The seventh-grader knew and trusted Rizzo through Rizzo's job at a video store, and he followed Rizzo into Rizzo's backyard under the guise of hunting snakes, prosecutors said.

Rizzo told police that he then straddled Stanley "like a horse" and hit him 13 times with the 3-pound sledgehammer as the boy begged him to stop. Rizzo later told authorities that he was interested in serial killers and wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody.

He dumped the boy's body nearby.

Rizzo was the first person sentenced to death under a 1995 change to state law that allows jurors in death penalty cases to weigh aggravating factors such as a crime's brutality against mitigating factors such as childhood abuse suffered by a defendant. A three-judge panel imposed the death sentence on Rizzo in 2005.

He appealed his sentence on numerous claims including that there was a lack of evidence of an aggravating factor, that the panel improperly weighed aggravating factors against mitigating factors and that the state's death penalty law violated both the U.S. and state constitutions.

The Supreme Court ruling Monday that the death penalty doesn't violate the constitutions reaffirmed its previous rulings in the death penalty cases of serial killer Michael Ross, who was executed in 2005, and Daniel Webb, who kidnapped and killed a bank executive in Hartford in 1989 and remains on death row.

"We're satisfied that the court did a thorough job and the decision was justified by the record," said Harry Weller, the state prosecutor on the appeal. "We will continue to do what is necessary to ensure the judgments are affirmed."

Rizzo's public defenders didn't return messages Monday. They can ask the state Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling and ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. If both those options fail, Rizzo would likely remain on death row for years - even decades - because of other appeals he can file.

Rizzo's lawyers also claimed that capital punishment doesn't serve the goals of deterrence, incapacitation or rehabilitation. The Supreme Court majority disagreed in an opinion written by Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers.

Last March, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 67 percent of Connecticut registered voters favored the death penalty - a new high.

"As long as there remains powerful evidence of strong public support for the death penalty ... we will not attempt to discern a contrary view of the public will, or to answer complex policy questions best answered by the legislative process," Rogers wrote in Monday's decision.

The court also rejected Rizzo's argument that his death sentence was arbitrary and violated his constitutional rights to due process and equal protection because there are no uniform standards in the state guiding prosecutors' decisions to seek the death penalty.

Rizzo, one of 10 men on Connecticut death row, pleaded guilty to capital felony in 1999, and a jury sentenced him to lethal injection. But the state Supreme Court overturned the sentence in 2003, ruling that a judge had not properly instructed jurors before they began deliberating.

Rizzo then chose a three-judge panel for the second penalty phase trial, and the panel sent him back to death row in 2005. The panel found that prosecutors proved one aggravating factor - that Rizzo murdered the boy "in an especially heinous, cruel or depraved manner" - and that factor outweighed the one mitigating factor proven by the defense.

Although Rizzo's lawyers submitted 45 proposed mitigating factors including childhood problems, the panel accepted only one - the combined effect of all the defense's mitigation evidence.

The Supreme Court on Monday also rejected Rizzo's claim that the panel was wrong to find only one mitigating factor. The justices further upheld the constitutionality of sections in the state death penalty law dealing with aggravating and mitigating factors.

William Dunlap, a law professor at Quinnipiac University, said Rizzo's appeal could have "derailed" the death penalty cases of Komisarjevsky and others, if justices had decided the other way on the constitutional issues. He said the ruling maintains the status quo.

"I don't see anything in there that's surprising at all," he said. "This does not seem to be a development in the jurisprudence of the death penalty in Connecticut."