U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal was visiting with Gregory
and Celeste Fulcher, whose daughter, Erika Robinson, 26, had been slain in a
nightclub shooting by Adrian Bennett, 28, aka “Bread.”
Mr. “Bread,” Mr. Fulcher told Mr. Blumenthal,
should not have had a gun, and he should not have been on parole: “It’s
senseless, he shouldn’t have been out of jail walking the streets as a
convicted felon.” Fulcher said of Mr. Bennett. “The system failed us, but I
also blame the establishment.”
The “establishment” was the Key Club Cabaret in New
Haven, no longer in business. Mr. Bennet is accused of having opened fire into
a crowd of people at the club, killing Ms. Robinson and injuring five others.
The “system” refers to the legislative, judicial and penology system in
Connecticut, as well as a set of default assumptions that consigns the murders
of African Americans living in cities to the dark recesses of our minds. What
happens in the cities stays in the cities. Crimes outside urban areas in
Connecticut quickly catch the attention of the media and politicians, but when
an innocent young boy or girl is gunned down in the urban jungle, people nod
their heads knowingly and quickly go about their business.
Such assumptions are salt rubbed into the open wound of
the Fulchers. This time, it was their daughter.
Mr. Blumenthal had mentioned Erika Robinson in a floor
speech in the U.S. Senate. Good for him. The Fulchers deeply appreciated the
notice. The familiarity with violent death in urban areas has bred in us a sort
of contempt. It’s an uphill fight for the Fulchers. Forgive them, won’t you?
They, like many a father and mother living on the outskirts of urban violence, expected
their daughter would be safe. They, like the rest of us, live within the
protective castellated walls of our reasonable expectations, one of which Mr.
Fulcher stated eloquently in the New Haven Register story: “It’s senseless, he
[Mr. “Bread”] shouldn’t have been out of jail walking the streets as a
convicted felon.”
At Ms. Bennet’s funeral, a childhood friend of Ms.
Robinson’s father, Brian Jenkins, delivered a citation from Connecticut’s General
Assembly and then gave vent to long pent up feelings: “Black men need to stand
up and be black. Fathers need to stand up and be fathers. We are the black men
of the city and it is more than just taking out the garbage and painting the
church…The church is filled with old people and the funeral home is filled with
young people. I am sick of it.”
Mr. Blumenthal commiserated with the Fulchers. According to
an account in the New Haven Register, “Blumenthal said one of the weaknesses in
the judicial system is the failure to properly supervise or even confine people
who are dangerous.
“‘Every human being, every person in the United States of America, is deserving of protection that our society failed to give to this young woman. It really goes beyond what happened in the bar, in a way it’s an indictment of the system.”
Mr. Blumenthal, for 20 years and more the Attorney
General of Connecticut before he was installed in the U.S. Senate, is used to
speaking in legalese: “indictment of the system.” It is difficult to break
through the ice of such formulations and touch the marrow in the bones, but Mr.
Jenkins came very close.
The family of Ibraham Ghazal is still living the Fulcher’s
nightmare, months after a felon released early on a new Risk Reduction Earned
Credits program developed by Governor Dannel Malloy’s undersecretary for
criminal justice policy at the Office of Policy and Management, Michael Lawlor,
illegally acquired a gun, entered an EZMart store in Meriden and shot to death
co-owner of the store Ibrahim Ghazal after Mr. Ghazal had obligingly handed
Frankie “The Razor” Resto the
cash in his register.
Because they’ve been through the political process
wringer, the Ghazals perhaps understand much better than Mr. Blumenthal the
bumps in Connecticut’s justice system. Indeed, Mr. Blumenthal himself has long
been a part of the system since 1977 when he was nominated by President Jimmy
Carter as U.S. Attorney for the district of Connecticut. He was Attorney
General for the state of Connecticut for more than 20 years before he became a
U.S. Senator.
So, how did the Ghazal murder shake out? Frankie “The
Razor” Resto was a violent criminal, well known to Connecticut prison guards,
and he never should have been paroled or released early under Mr. Lawlor’s problem riddled program,
which never received the scrutiny it deserved by the General Assembly before it
was smuggled through in an omnibus implementer bill. The early release credits
in Mr. Lawlor’s program were applied retroactively to prisoners who had not
completed the program.
When leading Republicans in the General Assembly forced a
belated public hearing and insisted that violent criminals should not be
allowed to participate in Mr. Lawlor’s program, their objections were loftily ignored. After
Connecticut Victim Advocate Michelle Cruz appeared in public to represent the
interests of the Gahazals and began to point out the shortcomings of Mr.
Lawlor’s Risk Reduction Earned Credits program, her job was put on the auction block. When
a State Senator attempted to receive from Mr. Lawlor data that would show
whether or not the early release program beneficially affected recidivism
rates, he was given the run around. Neither the media nor the General Assembly has
sufficiently examined closely the flaws in Mr. Lawlor’s defective program.
All of these matters might have been brought to public notice during Frankie
“The Razor” Resto’s murder trial. A public trial might have focused bright
light on “the weaknesses in the judicial system” one of which, Mr. Blumenthal
told the Fulcher, “is the failure to properly supervise or even confine people
who are dangerous” – like “The Razor” and “Bread.”
But – lucky for the system – it will not be “indicted” in
a public trial of Mr. Resto. At his own indictment hearing, Mr. Resto loudly
proclaimed that he would reject any deal prosecutors would make, choosing
instead to go to trial, but he later repented and decided to accept the deal
offered to him by “the system” Mr. Blumenthal condemned in his conversation
with the Fulner’s. Mr. Blumenthal has
never sat down to commiserate with the Gahazal family or former Victims
Advocate Cruz or Republican legislators who have been unsuccessful in
persuading the Malloy administration that violent felons such as rapists should
not expect get-out-of-jail early credits from Mr. Lawlor.
Concerning Mr. Resto, it appears that someone made him an
offer he could not refuse: There will be no public displays of the serious
fault lines in Mr. Lawlor’s defective Risk Reduction Earned Credits program.
And thanks to Mr. Lawlor’s reticence, legislative monitors of the program will
not be able to judge from the recidivism data he is reluctant to supply to
inquiring state senators whether his brainchild actually reduces recidivism
rates – which is, Mr. Lawlor has stated elsewhere, the underlining rational for
his program.
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