The abolition should have been applied retroactively to
Connecticut prisoners awaiting death, for reasons lucidly stated by Samuel
Johnson when he was reporting on debates in the House of Commons. The Nulla poena sine lege doctrine
-- “where there is no law, there is no transgression” – Mr. Johnson wrote, “is
a maxim not only established by universal consent, but in itself evident and
undeniable; and it is, Sir, surely no less certain that where there is no transgression,
there can be no punishment.” By abolishing the death penalty yet leaving the
penalty in force for those convicted of capital murder then awaiting punishment
on Connecticut’s death row, the General Assembly and Mr. Malloy were arranging
to execute prisoners in the absence of a law prescribing the death penalty for
capital felony. But – where there is no law, there can be no punishment. The death
penalty abolition law and the carve-out established by the General Assembly and
signed by Mr. Malloy, a former repentant prosecutor, was worse than
unconstitutional; it was arbitrary, patently unjust and a clear violation of
the Natural Law.
The carve-out, however, was POLITICALLY necessary. The
abolition bill was signed into law only five years after a horrific murder in Cheshire,
and wounds were still bleeding. Time, the old adage has it, heals all wounds. In
the fullness of time – only five years after two parolees had invaded Dr.
William Petit’s home, beat the doctor senseless with a baseball bat, forced his
wife to withdraw money from a bank account, raped and murdered both his wife
and one of his younger daughters and murdered three women by setting fire to
the house – the General Assembly and Mr. Malloy at long last had achieved their
purpose. After the Cheshire mass murder, gun sales spiked in Connecticut. If
it takes more than twenty minutes for police to arrive after you’ve called
them,”
one gun purchaser told me, “You have to depend on yourself.”
one gun purchaser told me, “You have to depend on yourself.”
In due course, the Connecticut Supreme Court vacated the
death penalty for the eleven death row inmates – for the wrong reason. The
court did not argue that it was a violation of justice itself to execute a
capital felon in the absence of a law prescribing the death penalty for felony
murder; instead, adopting a sociological pose, the court arbitrarily ruled that
“the death penalty was an outdated tool of justice at odds with today’s societal values," a judgement correctly characterized by Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers as “a
house of cards, falling under the slightest breath of scrutiny.”
Those politicians favoring abolition of the death penalty
most vigorously – co-chairs of the state’s judiciary committee Michael Lawlor,
now Mr. Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning, and
Andrew McDonald, recently appointed to Connecticut’s Supreme Court by Mr.
Malloy – argued implausibly that the death penalty had no deterrent value. If the prospect of death – which clears
the mind wonderfully, Dr. Johnson said – is not a deterrent, then NO PUNISHMENT
may be regarded as a deterrent; such is the ruling in the court of common
sense. Actually,
it was the failure to impose capital punishment, a feature designed into Connecticut’s
rococo death penalty process, that made deterrence less effective. Mr. McDonald has yet to be asked why he
did not recuse himself in the death penalty abolition decision.
Death penalty abolition is only one of the carrots in Mr.
Malloy’s penological reform quiver. Mr. Lawlor, also a prosecutor, has
constructed a Rube Goldberg penological machine that permits violent criminals
such as rapists to earn get-out-of-jail-early credits while in prison. One of
his students, a card-carrying member of a violent gang who burned his mattress
while in jail, served as a drug mule and assaulted guards and other prisoners, Frankie “The Razor” Resto, acquired an illegal weapon on release – not,
one may be sure, at a gun show --
waltzed into an EZMart store in Meriden, and shot and murdered the
co-owner of the store AFTER the victim had obligingly turned over his cash
register receipts to Mr. Razor. The vicious murderer plea bargained his
sentence and, in any case, presently has nothing to fear from Connecticut’s repealed
capital punishment law – or, for that matter, from Mr. Malloy’s penological
reforms, which are all carrots and no stick. Michelle Cruz, Connecticut's VictimsAdvocate at the time, who performed her duties much too conscientiously, was effectively replaced
by pro-abolition activist Malloy and his factotums.
Mr. Malloy’s latest attempt to repeal reality by redefining
settled concepts involves proposed legislation that would redefine the
parameters of juvenile behavior, and never mind that including convicted
criminals up to age 24 in the juvenile law bucket is itself a juvenile attempt
to change reality through magic thinking – which has little to do with genuine
penological reform. A more comprehensive penological reform would abolish ALL
punishments on the grounds that only therapeutic forgiveness deters crime. The
Malloy administration is not there yet.
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