Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

On December 14 of this year, a month after Connecticut’s general elections, people in the state will be memorializing the second year of the Sandy Hook slaughter. On that occasion in 2012, Adam Lanza carried with him to Sandy Hook Elementary school  an arsenal of weapons : an Izhmash Saiga 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun, a Bushmaster Model XM15-E2S .223-caliber semiautomatic rifle, a Glock 20 10mm semiautomatic handgun and a Sig Sauer P226 9mm semiautomatic handgun. He had taken with him to the school two 12-gauge shotgun magazines, ten 30-round .223 magazines, six 30-round 9mm magazines and six 30-round 10mm magazines. All the weapons and magazines had been lawfully purchased. Leaving in the car the shotgun he had illegally appropriated from his mother, whom he had just murdered with a Savage Mark II bolt-action .22-caliber rifle, Mr. Lanza shot his way into the school and methodically murdered 26 people with the Bushmaster rifle. Having killed 20 young children and 6 staff ...

The piling-on began following admissions made by Lisa Wilson Foley that a contract between herself and John Rowland, a radio talk show host following his stint in prison, was fraudulent, and recently Mr. Rowland, a burr in the side of Governor Dannel Malloy, announced he had recorded his last show. On the political stump – the governor, like his beau ideal President Barrack Obama, is rarely off the political stump – Mr. Malloy, along with the usual media attack pack, had called upon WTIC to sever its relations with Mr. Rowland. Even Mr. Malloy’s Undersecretary of Criminal Justice Michael Lawlor contributed his mite, according to a story in a New Haven paper . One of Mr. Rowland’s programs, Mr. Lawlor pointed out, “included talk about guns, and as a convicted felon,  Rowland is ineligible to legally own one .” Sure, sure. But the law – even the new gun law promulgated and supported by his eminence the Undersecretary of Criminal Justice Lawlor – is a me...

    On Friday, February 28, Frankie “The Razor” Resto was sentenced by Superior Court Judge Patrick Clifford to 53 years in prison for having murdered Abraham Ghazal. Mr. Resto had earlier rejected a plea arrangement, which must have caused Governor Dannel Malloy’s prison czar, Michael Lawlor, a moment of worry. Trials are unpredictable public presentations. One never knows what skeleton from what closet might pop out at you in the public arena. All the possible skeletons disappeared when Mr. Resto and his lawyer, Glenn Conway, agreed to palaver with the state and arrive at a plea arrangement satisfactory to both.

By Len Suzio Mr. Suzio was State Senator for the district in which the vicious murder below occurred. Connecticut Commentary has followed the story through all its permutations . Many of you may remember the cold blooded murder of Ibrahim Ghazal, an innocent 70 year-old store owner in Meriden at the end of June 2012. That story became a sensation because the murder was videotaped by the store security and because the man accused of the murder was a hardened criminal who had been released early from his prison sentence courtesy of Connecticut's "Early Release" law. The video showed Mr. Ghazal handing over the money without resistance and then a person later identified as Frankie Resto shooting him at point blank range. As the prosecutor prepared the case for trial a plea bargain deal was floated in front of Mr. Resto. The "deal" would have potentially reduced the sentence Mr. Resto would incur from a maximum of 80 years to only 40 years in exch...

Some stories just make your brain pop. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal was visiting with Gregory and Celeste Fulcher, whose daughter, Erika Robinson, 26, had been slain in a nightclub shooting by Adrian Bennett, 28, aka “Bread.” Mr. “Bread,” Mr. Fulcher told Mr. Blumenthal , should not have had a gun, and he should not have been on parole: “It’s senseless, he shouldn’t have been out of jail walking the streets as a convicted felon.” Fulcher said of Mr. Bennett. “The system failed us, but I also blame the establishment.”

During a public hearing on the state’s new Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program , the informational portion of which was devoted to testimony given by politicians rather than the public, there was a dead body in the room, that of Ibrahim Ghazal , murdered by Frankie “The Razor” Resto shortly after Mr. Resto, a violent criminal, had “earned” early release credits from a program that was the brain child of Mike Lawlor, tapped early in his administration by Governor Dannel Malloy to serve as Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning . Some of the public figures, notably among them Mr. Lawlor, d a nced nimbly around the corpse.

Connecticut has a new Victims Advocate in the person of Garvin Ambrose, formerly a prosecutor and political operative in Cook County, Illinois. Chicago, murder capital if the United States, falls in the middle of Cook County facing windswept Lake Michigan, arguably the most politically corrupt county in the United States.   There was nothing wrong with the state’s previous Victims Advocate, Michele Cruz, whose job was put on the sale block after she had strenuously – and, more importantly for media conscious Governor Dannel Malloy and his Malloyalists, publically – opposed the state’s new early prisoner release program,   the brainchild of undersecretary for criminal justice policy Mike Lawlor. Both Mr. Malloy and Mr. Lawlor were prosecutors before they began to dabble in politics.

The Hartford Courant has ignored its own admittedly unscientific poll, which asks “Should inmates beable to earn early release with re-entry programs?” Of the 508 responses received by the paper, 89 percent of respondents answered that question “No.” The number of those answering “Yes” was a slender 11 percent. On the basis of a recent editorial , “ Give Inmates A Better Chance On The Outside ,” one must assume the Courant editorial page editors fall among the 11 percenters.

Sen. Joe Markley (R-Southington) has written to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy urging the governor to suspend the state’s new program which enables violent felons to be released early from prison. In the letter, Sen. Markley cited the recent case involving Frankie Resto, who is charged with the June 27 murder of 70-year-old Meriden small business owner Ibrahim Ghazal. Resto, a violent felon, had been released early from prison under the state’s new Risk Reduction Earned Credit (RREC) program.

It cannot be a good sign that Michael Lawlor, Governor Dannel Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy at the Office of Policy and Management, seems incapable of making a proper distinction between violent prisoners under his jurisdiction and non-violent prisoners. Purely as a practical matter, the distinction was dramatically illustrated when Frankie Resto, released from prison early after having received credits under the General Assembly’s new Risk Reduction Earned Credits program, entered an EZ Mart store in Meriden and shot to death co-owner of the store Ibrahim Ghazal, who handed over the money he demanded to Mr. Resto before he was shot, according to police reports. Other reports demonstrate that Mr. Resto should not have been a candidate for early release under a flawed program that awards credits to violent criminals. The bill establishing the program was rushed through the legislature during its final hectic days, without the benefit of public hearings and ...

State Senator Len Suzio held a news conference in the Legislative Office Building, sparsely attended by the public but well attended by the state’s media, to call public attention to what he regards as serious failures in Connecticut’s newly adopted and Orwellian named early release Risk Reduction Earned Credits program. The title of the program begs the question -- Risk Reduction for whom? Certainly Ibrahim Ghazal’s risk of getting murdered as he was peaceably going about his daily business at an EZ Mart store in Meriden was not reduced after the program was hastily adopted in a legislative session normally devoted to budget fixes. A Democratic dominated General Assembly joined at the hip to the first Democratic governor in more than 20 years, Dannel Malloy,   has made it possible for ambitious Democrats to pass hastily contrived bills through a sausage making assembly line that in the past was considerably more thoughtful and deliberative.

Meriden falls within state Senator Len Suzio’s bailiwick. It was there on June 27 that Frankie Resto, recently released from prison under the state’s new and controversial Risk Reduction Earned Credits program, wandered into an EZ Mart store and shot to death Ibraham Ghazal, according to police who later apprehended and arrested Mr. Resto for the murder. Mr. Resto earned 199 days’ worth of credits toward early release while serving a prison sentence for two prior robberies. The murder of Ghazal almost immediately called into question both the purpose and the construction of the early release program, which enables violent felons to shorten their prison sentences if they abide by certain administrative rules. Prison officials and the Malloy administration, as well as legislators who crafted the program, evidentially wished to place in the hands of prison officials additional tools they felt would contribute to reducing risky behavior within the prison, hence the title o...

On July 6, two days after Independence Day, the children of Meriden store owner Ibraham Ghazal were featured in the Meriden Record Journal . Very likely they would have preferred to remain in obscurity, but the murder of their father had thrust notoriety upon them. A little more than a week earlier, the father of Tamer and Tharwat Ghazal had been shot and killed in the store he owned with a partner by a gunman who, it later was determined, had been a candidate for a Risk Reduction Credit Program passed into law by the General Assembly at the end of its hectic session. Tamer Ghazal, an attorney from Jordan, was reluctant to talk about the murder. But when he was told by the paper’s reporter that the likely gunman who had killed his father had been released from prison without having served his full sentence for an earlier robbery, he asked, “How did he get out early?” A bewildered store clerk working the cash register at the EZ Mart during the crime – Mr. Ghazal surrendered t...