Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Governor Dannel Malloy’s Nominee for Chief Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, Justice Andrew McDonald, was sent to the General Assembly with a negative recommendation. The nomination  passed in the House by one vote, where Democrats have a six member edge over Republicans, and is now headed towards the Senate, which is split 18-18 among Democrats and Republicans. The Republican leader in the Senate, Len Fasano, said on a radio talk show recently that he is inclined to vote down the nomination.  After viewing all McDonald's opinions -- and also interviewing McDonald -- Fasano feels that McDonald is prone to affirming a possibly flawed decision if the decision contains a partial narrative that supports his apriori views. For instance, McDonald believes that the death penalty may be racist because it falls disproportionately on blacks, a doubtful datum. If a decision to abolish the death penalty supported that view, McDonald would be inclined to support it. That mo...

Thinking perhaps that he was Twitter-in-Chief President Donald Trump, Undersecretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning at the Office of Policy and Management Michael Lawlor in late January fired off the following tweet: “ Wow, Connecticut gets its first full-force racist enabler candidate for Attorney General.” According to CTMirror , Lawlor’s target was “Susan Hatfield, a state prosecutor from eastern Connecticut who was a Donald J. Trump delegate in 2016 and once worked in Washington as a young policy aide to former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich…” Hatfield, a Republican, is running for the Attorney General spot soon to be vacated by George Jepsen. For any number of reasons, this was not the brightest tweet in Lawlor’s constellation of tweets. Imputing racism to all Trump delegates smacks of McCarthyism, and Hatfield is a woman who should be able to toss her hat into a political ring without being peppered by politicians operating in the #me-too era who ought to...

Sir James George Frazier, author of “The Golden Bough,” an examination of pre-literate, pre-Christian social mores among primitives, tells the story of a ritualistic punishment involving a murder. The foul deed was done with a knife. The village elders gather together in a hut and call witnesses to give testimony. First the presumed murderer is closely interrogated, then the family of the victim. Last of all, the knife is called to testify. Closely examined, it is pronounced guilty and suitably punished by the elders, who execute the weapon by throwing it in the river. Scapegoats are sometimes used for the same purpose; they are guilt receptacles that receive blood-guilt and are afterwards destroyed.

Connecticut’s Supreme Court has decided that the state cannot execute the eleven convicted killers sentenced to death awaiting punishment on Death Row.  Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane ran up a white flag shortly after the decision had been rendered. According to a story in the Hartford Courant, Mr. Kane said the eleven Death Row inmates would be re-sentenced to life in prison without benefit of parole. The High Court’s earlier judgment on the death penalty was a sand castle built on sand: So said Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers, who last August wrote a stinging dissent following the decision of the court. The court at that time ruled that executing a Death Row inmate "would violate the state constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment." The death penalty, the court noted, “no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency." Three justices – Rogers, Justice Carmen E. Espinosa and Justice Peter T. Zarella offered a stinging rebuke...

I n 2012, Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly abolished capital punishment but carved out an exception for convicted murderers awaiting the death penalty on death row. The carve-out for the eleven death row prisoners was a blatant violation of what used to be called the natural law, a series of political, philosophical and penological assumptions that informs all laws, statutory and constitutional. 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 forc...