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| Eric Lindquist |
Most people whose lives have not been radically disrupted by a violent crime have only a notional understanding of crime and punishment in Connecticut.
The heinous murder of three members of his immediate family
by Sergio Correa, a habitual criminal released early on parole, has made an
activist of Eric Lindquist.
Correa was sentenced to life in prison without parole
following his trial and conviction of murdering in December of 2018 three
members of the Lindquist family – father and mother, W.H. Kenneth and Janet, and
a son, Matthew Lindquist.
Correa murdered Matthew, testimony at trial showed, because he
had reneged on a deal to exchange his father’s guns for drugs to be supplied by
Correa, who then went on to murder Mathew’s father and mother, an assault so
vicious that prosecutors tried Correa on a charge of “murder with special circumstances –
the most serious charge a person can face in Connecticut.”
Execution used to be the most serious punishment for heinous crimes in Connecticut before the
state Supreme Court abolished the death
penalty a dozen years ago after, one newspaper reported, “A legislative committee
has taken a brave step toward abolishing Connecticut's death penalty, a law
that is all but unworkable, not to mention expensive, unfair and risky."
The “special circumstances” provision was supposed to
provide a non-lethal punishment more severe than “life in prison without parole.”
Connecticut’s high court had ruled that the death penalty violated presumed
changes in morality that had rendered the death penalty obsolete. Actually, it
was unending habeas
corpus appeals that had rendered the death penalty inoperable, the
moral posturing of the court, and its patently absurd pretense that life in
prison was in some sense a more severe penalty than execution.
At Correa’s sentencing hearing, Eric Linquist read into the court
record Correa’s prior parole pleas and criminal history because, he said, “I
was hoping it would be an eye opener for people to see that efforts to
rehabilitate an incarcerated person are largely met with failure. You cannot
rehabilitate a person and know whether it has worked because everyone will do
anything and say anything to get out of jail, regardless of whether or not they
have been rehabilitated.”
“I would like to give back to the community I harmed for so
long by becoming a law-abiding citizen who helps knit the fabric of society
rather than rip it,” Correa wrote to the parole board. He begged the board to
grant his parole petition so that he could “start his life” over again. A short
100 days later, he murdered three people, without fear of execution, because
the state’s high court had abolished capital punishment and, sometime
later, vacated the capital punishment sentences of 11 other murderers sentenced
to death, some of whom were in the process of exhausting their appeals.
Among the 11 whose sentences were set aside in favor of life
in prison by Connecticut’s Supreme Court were two prisoners, also on parole,
who murdered, after having raped, three members of Dr. William Pettit’s family, a
mother and two daughters. Members of the state Supreme Court whose understanding of
that crime was far less granular than the jury that found the two guilty of a
capital offence simply vacated the jury’s deliberated verdict because the court
reasoned, implausibly, 1) that there had been a sea change on the question of
the imposition of capital punishment, and 2) the notion that punishment deters crime is much overrated.
This last absurd notion is today one of the operative
elements in many prison reform efforts in Connecticut initiated by Mike
Lawlor, who had served with Andrew
McDonald, now a Supreme Court Justice, as a co-chair of Connecticut’s
Judiciary Committee. The devaluation of the deterrent effect of punishment,
pushed to its logical conclusion, is an argument that would throw on the ash heap
of history all apprehensions by police, all justice proceedings, and all impositions
of punishment.
“Unfortunately,” Eric Lindquist told a reporter following the
sentencing of Correa, “while my family and I have closure we were looking for,
the level of justice, we feel, does not fit the gravity of the crime. I look
forward to working with the state legislature in the coming years to reform some
of those policies that I view as failures and do better for future victims and
their families.”
Victims of crimes all across the state, and legislators,
prosecutors and judges who do not leave their common sense at home before
setting off to work to advance the public good may pray Lindquist is successful.
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