Connecticut has a
new Victims Advocate in the person of Garvin Ambrose, formerly a prosecutor and
political operative in Cook County, Illinois.
Chicago, murder
capital if the United States, falls in the middle of Cook County facing
windswept Lake Michigan, arguably the most politically corrupt county in the
United States.
There was nothing
wrong with the state’s previous Victims Advocate, Michele Cruz, whose job was
put on the sale block after she had strenuously – and, more importantly for
media conscious Governor Dannel Malloy and his Malloyalists, publically –
opposed the state’s new early prisoner release program, the brainchild of undersecretary for
criminal justice policy Mike
Lawlor. Both Mr. Malloy and Mr. Lawlor were prosecutors before they began to
dabble in politics.
As a prosecutor and
a political operative, Mr. Ambrose can be expected to fit in well with other
Malloyalists, principally Mr. Lawlor.
Mr. Lawlor has had a
distinguished left of center career in law and penology.
Directly out of law
school, he was appointed prosecutor for the State’s Attorney Office in New
Haven, serving there until his election to the state House of Representatives
in 1986. He is a Professor of
Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven's Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences and also a Visiting Lecturer in Law at the Yale Law
School. Co-chairman
of the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 2011, Mr. Lawlor,
along with former senate co-chair Andrew McDonald, recently appointed by the
governor to Connecticut’s Supreme Court, led the state in liberalizing laws
relating to gays.
Four years ago, when Mr. Lawlor and Mr. McDonald attempted to change the apostolic nature of the Catholic Church
by forcing upon the church a protestant administrative apparatus, many of their
colleagues in the legislature, along with crowds of Catholics who assembled at
the Capitol to protest a naked political intervention of the state into
religious affairs, turned back a bill the two co-chairs of the judiciary
committee had hoped to slide past their colleagues. Other vigilant legislators
on the judiciary committee were successful in upholding the church’s first
amendment rights, according to which the U .S. Congress – and, by extension,
other state legislative bodies – are prohibited from writing laws that prohibit
the free exercise of religion.
More recently, the Democratic controlled General Assembly abolished
Connecticut’s death penalty only a few months after two paroled prisoners
living in a halfway house invaded a home in Cheshire, beat the father of the
family senseless with a baseball bat, raped a mother of two daughters, one of
whom was also raped by one of the prisoners, and set the house on fire, killing
all inside but the father, who had escaped and testified against the two at
trial. The two “three times and you’re not out” professional criminals were
sentenced to death. However, a short time after sentence was pronounced, the
Democratic dominated legislature and governor passed into law a bill abolishing
the death penalty for all but those awaiting punishment on death row. As co-chair
of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Lawlor strongly favored abolition.
As a state legislator, Mr. Lawlor was instrumental in derailing a “three
strikes and you’re out” bill that would have increased punishments for repeat
offenders. Mr. Lawlor strongly opposed an effort in the late 1990s to relieve
overcrowding in state prisons by transferring prisoners to Virginia, preferring
instead “alternative ways of combating overcrowding,” according to a New
York Times report, “like making it harder to put people back in prison
for technical violations of their parole,” arguing that “transfers should be a
last resort."
The jewel in Mr. Lawlor’s crown, however, is Connecticut’s trouble prone
early release Risk Reduction Earned Credits program.
The chief problem with Mr. Lawlor’s brainchild is that it offers a window
of opportunity to violent criminals such as Frankie “The Razor” Resto, so
called because Mr. Resto occasionally used a razor to shake down lower level
drug pushers. Released early, Mr. Resto, who had engaged in drug activity while
in prison, where he had burned his mattress before receiving Mr. Lawlor’s
credits, traveled to Meriden where he shot the co-owner of an EZMart, Ibraham Ghazal, killing him with a gun
he probably had not lawfully purchased. Connecticut laws, not one of which such criminals respect, prohibits murder and the unlawful purchase of hand guns by
professional criminals such as Mr. Resto who, thanks to Mr. Lawlor’s opposition
to “three strikes and you’re out” legislation,” was very much in business when
he murdered Mr. Ghazal. Shortly after
the murder of Mr. Ghazal, yet another graduate of Mr. Lawlor’s early release
program murdered yet another store clerk in Manchester, and only last week Vernon Lloyd, another criminal with a long rap sheet suspected by police in ongoing shooting
investigations, was early let loose upon his former pregnant girlfriend in
Hartford, where he held her under duress for three days.
Under a “three strikes and you’re out” policy for flawed programs, Mr.
Lawlor’s early release program would be quickly abandoned. But Mr. Lawlor and
Mr. Malloy, both former prosecutors, are determined to persevere; to be sure,
media criticism has been light, though the Journal Inquirer recently ran two
stories on Mr. Malloy’s choice of Mr. Ambrose as Connecticut’s
new Victim’s Advocate. Both stories cited objections from a group called IllinoisVictims.org that “wrote to lawmakers last week, questioning Malloy’s pick of Ambrose for
the position. Ambrose had taken positions against measures that would boost victims’
rights in their state, the letter said.”
Mr. Ambrose, politically
attuned and not likely to make waves, is expected to pass legislative scrutiny.
He is in many ways a perfect fit for a political organization that has a Cook
County flavor to it.
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