Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Casey and her mother Wendy "I just started grief counseling. I'm always sad. I'm sad and in pain and I miss her." Wendy Hartling   Hartling is the mother of Casey Chadwick, murdered in 2015 by Jean Jacques , an illegal Haitian immigrant. Jacques was convicted of the murder of Chadwick in a New London Superior Court jury trial and sentenced by Judge Barbara Bailey Jongbloed to a 60 year term in prison. Since Jacques is 44 years of age, the sentence was, in effect, a life sentence. Connecticut Commentary coverage of the Chadwick murder may be found here , and here   and here . Jacques could not have been sentenced to death because Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly, under pressure from the state Supreme Court, had abolished Connecticut’s death penalty law in 2012 . The slaughter of Chadwick was particularly brutal. Her body had been found by a friend who, opening a door to a closet, discovered Chadwick stuffed in a dark corner drenched in blo...

“We are continuing to work with and await guidance from the appropriate federal agencies on screening measures that will be taken. With that said, if refugees – many who are children fleeing a horrific war-torn country—seek and are granted asylum after a rigorous security process, we should and will welcome them in Connecticut,” so said a spokesperson for Governor Dannel Malloy,   according to a piece in the Hartford Courant . There are some obvious difficulties with this passage. Syria is administered by an odious dictator, perhaps even more ruthless than the father who preceded him, and rigorous screening measures such as those mentioned by Malloy are not always possible in horrific, war-torn countries. Of course, a screening examination of even the most cursory kind is never possible in the case of illegal aliens from wretched countries such as Honduras and Guatemala who, crossing through Mexico, bum-rush the US border and thereafter become nearly invisible tucked...

In Connecticut, some illegal aliens – an illegal alien being a non-citizen who has illegally entered the country and therefore is not, according to national and state laws, a lawful immigrant – commit crimes and remain un-deported. Such was the case with Jean Jacques, a Haitian who entered the country illegally and later was arrested and convicted of attempted murder. Jacques spent seventeen years in Connecticut prisons and was supposed to be remanded on release to ICE, so that he might be deported. The deportation never occurred for reasons that remain fuzzy. On his release from prison, Jacques murdered a young girl, Casey Chadwick, stabbing her to death fifteen times and depositing her body in a closet where she was discovered by her boyfriend. As of this date, we do not know how Jacques was permitted to fall between the cracks. ICE claims that Haiti disputed Jacques’ citizenship or did not have available the paperwork necessary to show that he was a Haitian citizen. C...

A solution to a problem that does not solve the problem but instead creates in the public mind the appearance of a solution is often a useful political gambit. This appears to be the case with “Casey’s Law,” a non-solution that saves politicians the trouble of bruising their knuckles on the destructive policies they support – such as sanctuary cities. It is a fiction that there are only a limited number of sanctuary cities in Connecticut. The truth is – the entire state is a sanctuary state.

Casey Chadwick’s friend opened the door to a closet on June 15 a little less than a year ago, he found her body stuffed in a dark corner drenched in blood. At the trial of Jean Jacques, an illegal Haiti alien, a medical examiner would later tell a jury how she died. Jacques had slashed and stabbed Ms. Chadwick 15 times. A severed jugular vein and carotid artery caused her to lose 40 percent of her blood within seconds of the attack. Jean Jacques was convicted of murder on April 11 and will be sentenced June 6 by Judge Barbara Jongbloed. The convicted murderer faces between 25 years and 60 years in prison. Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly a few years ago abolished the state’s death penalty for all capital murder crimes, however heinous.