"Connection reset by peer" is the TCP/IP equivalent of slamming the phone back on the hook. It's more polite than merely not replying, leaving one hanging. But it's not the FIN-ACK expected of the truly polite TCP/IP converseur. (From other SO answer)
So you can't do anything about it, it is the issue of the server.
But you could use try .. except
block to handle that exception:
from socket import error as SocketError
import errno
try:
response = urllib2.urlopen(request).read()
except SocketError as e:
if e.errno != errno.ECONNRESET:
raise # Not error we are looking for
pass # Handle error here.