Certainly Ibrahim Ghazal’s risk of getting murdered as he was peaceably going about his daily
business at an EZ Mart store in Meriden was not reduced after the program was
hastily adopted in a legislative session normally devoted to budget fixes. A
Democratic dominated General Assembly joined at the hip to the first Democratic
governor in more than 20 years, Dannel Malloy, has made it possible for ambitious Democrats
to pass hastily contrived bills through a sausage making assembly line that in
the past was considerably more thoughtful and deliberative.
Police have arrested
Frankie Resto, a prisoner who had been given early release credits under the
provisions of the General Assembly’s new law, for the murder of Mr. Ghazal.
In the blink of an
eye this session, Democrats were able to abolish the death penalty – by arguing
that the prospect of death does not deter capitol felonies. At the time of
passage, Connecticut Commentary argued that if capital punishment had no deterrent
value at all, no punishment, however minor, could deter crime. At times the
Democrats appeared to be arguing for the abolition of punishment as well as
capital punishment.
The bill abolishing
the death penalty, passed by Democrats
over the muted objections of an emasculated Republican minority, applied
abolition prospectively. The bill was crafted so as not to affect the
Connecticut 11, capitol felons presently awaiting execution on death row.
Thanks to a cowardly
Democratic majority in the General Assembly, Connecticut is now prepared to
execute 11 men in the absence of a law mandating execution for heinous crimes,
oblivious of the natural law informing all jurisprudence, according to which
men may not arbitrarily be punished in the absence of a law prescribing
punishment: Nulla poena sine lege -- “Where there is no law, there is no
transgression” – is, outside of the totalitarian state, a part of the Natural
Law that informs Western laws and ethics. The natural law, in its varying permutations,
may be found in the Torah, the Sermon on the Mount, the Magna Carta, statutory
law and the U.S. Constitution. Alas, Connecticut’s General Assembly and its
governor, formerly a prosecutor, are untouched by it.
Mr. Suzio’s too loud
objections to the hastily written and poorly applied Risk Reduction Earned Credits program has
produced a sour note from Michael Lawlor, who had served in the General
Assembly for a quarter century before accepting a well paid position among
Malloyalists as the governor’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy and
planning at the Office of Policy and Management. As co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, Mr.
Lawlor was practiced at sliding dubious legislation past his Republican
comrades on the committee, not always successfully.
“The idea that you
could take a tragedy of what happened in Meriden, this murder, and turn it into
some sort of a political football is really outrageous,” Lawlor told a reporterfor CTNewsJunkie. “I think it’s extremely irresponsible to
capitalize on a tragedy like this.” Mr. Lawlor added that if Mr. Suzio was
serious about getting something done, he wouldn’t be holding a press
conference, because that’s not how public policy is changed in the Malloy
regime.
Mr. Suzio, as well
as family victims left in grief by behavior even Mr. Lawlor might consider
anti-social, do not agree with that assessment.
Mr. Lawlor argues
that under the previous program, Mr. Resto would have been released earlier.
Mr. Suzio argues that Mr. Resto was released early under the auspices of the
new Risk Reduction Earned
Credits program, and the credits that served as his get-out-of-jail-early
card should never have been applied in a rigorous and fault free early release program.
“He [Mr. Resto] actually
got drunk in prison at one point in time,” Suzio said at his press conference.
“He set a fire in a prison, yet he still earned 199 days early release
credits?”
To date, 7,589
prisoners, many convicted of violent felonies, have been released early under
the provisions of the retroactively applied Risk Reduction Earned
Credits
program. Where will they be living, asks State Victim Advocate Michelle Cruz?
The state, she points out, has only 1180 beds at half way houses and 3,500
behavioral slots available to those who receive early release. Who is supervising
their release? Have they been given psychiatric evaluation before release? How
are the credits applied?
“Many of the
offenders are being granted RREC for simply signing up for a
program rather than completing the program. For example,” Ms.
Cruz said, “a sex offender who refuses to sign up for sex offender treatment as
required, is instead signing up for programs such as study of the Philippines.
Once they sign up they are receiving credits to get out early,”
In her research, Ms.
Cruz cites inmates denied parole for failure to complete required programs
while at the same time earning risk reduction credits for enrolling in programs
they do not need. “For example a sex offender who refuses to sign up for sex
offender treatment as required, is instead signing up for programs such as
study of the Philippines. Once they sign up they are receiving credits to get
out early,” said Cruz.
Ms. Cruz has asked
the Department of Correction to calculate the recidivism rates of the 7,589
inmates released through the program.
The most recent
study of recidivism within the Connecticut Department of Correction, completed
in February of 2012 by the State Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division
of the Office of Policy and Management, followed 14,398 male sentenced
offenders after they were released or discharged from a prison facility in
2005, providing a five year review of recidivism. The study found that within
five years of their release; 79 percent were re-arrested, 69 percent were
convicted of a new crime, and 50 percent were returned to prison with a new
sentence.
The study also found
that; 50 percent of the offender group had served at least one sentence for
violating the terms of their probation, 46 percent had served time in prison
for a drug charge and 19 percent had served a prior sentence for driving under
the influence or alcohol or drugs.
Reviewing the cases
of 773 early release inmates returned to custody for either committing a new
offense or violation of probation or parole, Ms. Cruz has discovered that many
were re-arrested for: Violation of a protective order (felony); Carrying a
dangerous weapon (felony); Attempt to
commit arson 3rd Degree(felony); Burglary 3rd (felony); Attempt to commit arson
1st degree (felony).
Surely such data
would be of interest to legislative Democrats in the General Assembly who may
have prematurely approved the Risk Reduction Earned
Credits program.
At one point in his
news conference, Mr. Suzio hoisted in the air, none too steadily, a bulging
file containing the prison discipline records of one of the graduates of the
new Risk Reduction Earned
Credits program.
Perhaps he should have
mailed it to Mr. Lawlor.
Mr. Ghazal’s murder
occurred four streets down from Mr. Suzio’s residence in Meriden, and it
demonstrates, Mr. Suzio said during his inconvenient press availability, that theRisk Reduction Earned
Credits program could use a bit of fine tuning, a suggestion
to which the governor and Commissioner of Department of Prisons Leo Arnone so
far have turned a deaf ear; now comes Mr. Lawlor sniping that Mr. Suzio is
exploiting a murder purely for political purposes.
Pray, was the
prospective provision in the death penalty abolition bill not inserted into
that piece of legislation for political reasons? And was the abolition bill
favored by Democrats and Malloyalists not created by politicians? And may it
not be said of that measure that Democrats in the General Assembly, in the
course of passing the bill, made rather extravagant appeals to emotional
sentiments to insure passage of the legislation? In ordinary political parlance,
we call this politicians being politicians.
Mr. Suzio, quite
reasonably, is trying to assemble information that will allow him to improve a
program hastily pushed through the legislature. So far, he has been met with
prevarications, information supplied to him that is at best ambiguous if not
misleading, and charges from Mr. Lawlor that he is exploiting for political
purposes the pain caused by a criminal whose record WHILE INCARCERATED IN
PRISON suggests that he never should have been given early release credits
through the General Assembly’s hastily devised – and apparently non-adjustable
– risk laden Risk Reduction Earned
Credits program.
In passing the
program, the General Assembly blew on a dandelion full of seeds that will take
root everywhere in Connecticut, not only in Meriden. When a legislature enacts
a bill, it must own the real time consequences of the bill. And the media
should be asking: Whose risks are reduced by Governor Malloy’s and Mr. Lawlor’s
and the Democratic dominated General Assembly’s Risk Reduction Earned
Credits
program?
But first, they will
have to get past Mr. Lawlor’s political spam.
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