Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The short answer to the question “Why can’t whistle blowers beat city hall?” is – because the statutory, administrative and judicial cards are stacked against the whistle blower. The game is fixed, as usual in favor of those who forcefully wield power. The purpose of the whistle blower statute is admirable and necessary. If you are a worker in a state or municipal agency and you discover in the course of your duties some sort of malfeasance, large or small, it is in the interest of the state that the problem should be reported to people who are authorized to correct the deficiency. If not you, then who? This is how operations seriously derailed are righted. It goes without saying that administrators in deficient agencies have a personal interest in quashing all whistle blower reports.

Speaker of the State House of Representatives Chris Donovan, actively running for the U.S. Congress in Connecticut’s 5th District, apparently has “compromised” on his most recent bill that would have hiked the state’s minimum wage 75 cents on July 1 and another 75 cents a year later, establishing in Connecticut, the land of steady spending habits, yet another first: the state with the highest minimum wage in the nation. Donovan’s compromise is a bit like that of Solomon’s, who proposed that a baby whose parentage had been questioned should be cut in half with a sword, each half to be parceled out to the disputing mothers. Solomon’s inelegant solution, offered as a ploy to ferret out the real mother, would have resulted in a dead baby. Mr. Donovan – perhaps in order to demonstrate his willingness to compromise should he ever reach the U.S. House of Representatives – has now offered a more “moderate” proposal: The Labor and Public Employees Committee recently voted 8-3, with the consen...

The Whistleblower Trap Priscilla Dickman, all 5 foot 2 of her, has been wiggling on former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s torture rack for six agonizing years. The end in sight keeps disappearing over the horizon whenever her case comes to a decision point. Ms. Dickman, a union steward when she was in the employ of the UConn Heath Center (UCHC), all 110 pounds of her, is still fighting for what most of us would consider decent justice, but it eludes her whenever she stretches out her hand to grasp it. Not that she is dispirited, not at all. She has been conducting the civil side of her case pro se (by her self) and in the intervening six years has cast serious doubt on the proposition that a fool has himself for a lawyer. The criminal and civil side of her case is being handled by John Geida of Embry Neuser, while Norm Pattis is handling Ms. Dickman’s habeas charge of innocence. Early on in Ms. Dickman’s ordeal, she was represented for a number of years by union lawyers who ...

Attorney Sandra Norman-Eady, testifying before a special legislative committee, said there were no clear rules or language in the cases she had examined that dictate how the committee, poised to decide whether Sen. Lou DeLuca should be expelled from the chamber, should decide the issue. "There's nothing definitive,” Norman-Eady said, “that says it has to be a felony conviction for expulsion.” Having consulted relevant passages from James Madison in the Federalist Papers, Sen. Anthony Guglielmo told the committee that the constitutional founders set a pretty high standard for expulsion; they “were concerned about overturning the elections of duly elected officials." Both Norman-Eady and Guglielmo are right. Very likely, legislators may expel members for cause – any cause. On the other hand, overturning elections is a serious business, and so the cause ought to be denial proof. Expulsion is particularly chancy when legislatures are dominated by a single party. Precedence is...