The connection is never closed because it is reused as many times as possible. The SQL Exception is not enough reason to close the connection. There are many possible SQL exceptions which do not prevent from reusing the connection for further calls and queries.
Therefore the release method is not supposed to close the connection. When the DB connections is broken for whatever reason the JVM and OS takes care of cleaning unused objects and resources.
In case of SQLException, the connection object is never closed.
In fact, the connection is never closed. The release method does nothing: