Malloy, Master Court Packer

A Hartford paper has noted in an editorial that Governor Dannel Malloy, the chief executive of Connecticut’s one-party state, is packing courts with Democratic appointments.  Of the nominees “to fill vacancies on the Superior Court bench and two judges to serve on the Appellate Court,” Mr. Malloy has chosen from a list presented to him by the Judicial Selection Commission eighteen (18) Democrats and zero (0) Republicans. 

In its gently reproving editorial, the paper remarked on the imbalance: “The dramatic partisan imbalance in Mr. Malloy's class of 18 doesn't necessarily mean any of those nominated are unqualified to serve. Each was, in fact, found qualified after an investigation by the Judicial Selection Commission, which prepares a list from which the governor chooses his nominees.”

The paper does not mention in its editorial the number of Republicans on the list submitted to Mr. Malloy who had been passed over as “unqualified” to serve on Mr. Malloy’s Democratic packed Superior and appellate courts.

The editorial commends Mr. Malloy for having “done better in his four Supreme Court nominees. He picked a Republican, an unaffiliated voter and two Democrats,” one of whom, Andrew McDonald, had been the co-chair of the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee, serving alongside Michael Lawlor, presently Mr. Malloy’s Prison Czar.

Mr. Lawlor and Mr. McDonald were the two Democratic leaders in the General Assembly who spearheaded the Democrat’s successful attack on Connecticut’s death penalty. Under their baleful influence, the Democratic dominated General Assembly abolished Connecticut’s death penalty for, say, mass murderers shortly after two prisoners on parole invaded a house in Cheshire, raped the mother of two daughters, raped one of the daughters and murdered three women by setting them afire. The two parolees, operating out of a half-way house, were tried, convicted and sentenced to death, where they joined eleven other convicted murders on death row. The Sandy Hook massacre occurred after the abolition of the death penalty. Had the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School been taken alive, he could not have received the death penalty, considered a useless and inhumane excrescence by both Undersecretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning at the Office of Policy and Management Lawlor and Supreme Court Justice McDonald.

No Republican has yet accused Mr. Malloy or Mr. Lawlor or Mr. McDonald of having waged a bloody “war on women” by ending rather than mending a death penalty that conceivably could dissuade future prisoners released early under Mr. Lawlor’s get-out-of-jail-early program from committing rape or arson. Of the 11 inmates awaiting execution on death row, not a few have murdered women: Indeed, Michael Ross, the last death row prisoner to have been executed in the state, specialized in raping and strangling women. His last two victims were fourteen-year-old girls.

Because the Democratic dominated General Assembly was far too cowardly to move prisoners sentenced to death into life sentences, legislators declined to convert to life in prison the death sentences of convicted murders awaiting execution. By partially eliminating the death penalty, those legislators who voted for abolition have assented to the execution of prisoners in the absence of a law prescribing death for capital felonies, a violation of the natural law undergirding all statutory and constitutional law since the code of Hammurabi – which holds that here can be no punishment in the absence of a law prescribing a punishment. If there is no death penalty law, there can be no death penalty punishment.

Mr. Malloy has elevated to Connecticut’s highest court one of his political cronies – Mr. McDonald has had a long political association with Mr. Malloy – who MUST recuse himself on any matter brought before the Supreme Court touching on the death penalty, and numerous decisions of this kind are awaiting disposition before the court. No one will doubt that Mr. McDonald is, in the words of the Hartford paper, “qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.” Whether Mr. McDonald will bow to political pressure in his service is an altogether different question.

The mildly reproved Mr. Malloy packs courts with Democrats because he CAN do it. In a one party state dominated by progressives in which the major media operates on the assumption that the left is, like Caesar’s wife, beyond criticism, the chief executive will deploy near autocratic unquestioned power.

When Alice in Wonderland questions Humpty Dumpty for “making words mean so many different things,” she is told in the accents of all Caesars everywhere, “The question is which is to be master - - that's all."