Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Chief Justice of Connecticut’s Supreme Court Chase Rogers is retiring after 11 years. There are murmurs at the State Capital that Associate Justice Andrew McDonald might fill the vacancy. When all vacancies are filled, Governor Dannel Malloy will have appointed 6 of 7 Justices to the Court. McDonald, the youngest Justice on the court, was the lame-duck Governor's Chief Legal Counsel before he was appointed to  the Court by Malloy in 2013. McDonald had been with the Governor since Malloy’s salad days as Mayor of Stamford. Malloy’s Chief Counsels and political staff have been particularly favored during his administration. Luke Bronin, presently Mayor of Hartford, a city teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and in need of frequent cash transfusions from the state, also had served as Chief Counsel to Malloy.

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...

Norm Pattis, a well-known Connecticut criminal attorney, is reconsidering capital punishment, the death penalty abolished by the General Assembly in 2012. The death penalty was “broken” said the abolitionists, by which they meant it could not be executed. As a practical matter, they were right. Capital punishment was so hedged about with seemingly endless processes that it took the state of Connecticut nearly twenty years to put to death mass murderer Michael Ross , who had raped and strangled most of his eight victims, the last two fourteen year-old girls. Had not Mr. Ross pulled the plug on his own appeals process, he might still be with us. Connecticut’s capital punishment law was “broken” because the sometimes pointless navigation  through all the legal breakwaters made the execution of the sentence nearly impossible. But instead of mending it – retaining the punishment for multiple murder crimes or the murder of public safety officers for example -- the General As...

The repeal of the death penalty has produced some aftershocks. Of course, the real aftershocks will arrive after the next heinous murder, though it should be said that the multiple murders of Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky have set a high bar. These two worthies beat a husband with a baseball bat, tied him in the cellar of his house, forced his wife to draw out thousands of dollars from a bank, raped her, raped one of the daughters, tied both daughters to their beds, set fire to both, sprinkled the house with gasoline and murdered all inside but Dr. William Petit, who managed to escape and afterward demand the death penalty for Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky, readily granted to him by two separate juries. In Connecticut, death penalty cases require both a jury trial and a death penalty hearing. Somewhat like Ishmael of Moby Dick fame, Mr. Petit was a lone survivor, a rather chatty one, determined to seek justice for his wrecked Pequod. Anti-death penalty proponents found ...

Q: The death penalty was abolished by the Senate on April 5. It’s a virtual certainty that the House also will approve the Democrat inspired bill. Do you feel safer? A: Can’t say. Part of the abolition bluster was that the death penalty did not prevent murders, always a questionable assumption. Q: “Bluster?” What ever can you mean? A: It was never a serious proposition, just a useful piece of propaganda. Q: But the polls! A: Think of what is meant when it is said that a punishment deters crime. How do you collect reliable data showing that the death penalty – or, indeed, any punishment – deters an action? Reliable data retrieval showing that the death penalty has deterred Mr. Smith from murdering Mrs. Smith cannot be collected from Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith is invisible. And if he’s smart, he will choose to remain invisible. The pollster can’t find him.   Mr. Smith is not likely to step out of the shadows and volunteer that he was contemplating the murder of his wife. The po...

The editorial board of the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper, waited patiently until a penalty hearing jury brought in a finding that Joshua Komisarjevsky must die by lethal injection before getting into print, only hours later, an editorial demanding the abolition of the state’s death penalty . The editorial is only incidentally related to the case at hand, and very likely portions of it were written long before a jury of his peers decided that Mr. Komisarjevsky should be executed. It is an all-purpose declaration, suitable in every death penalty case, a suit of arguments that will fit any body of evidence. For instance, the editorial points to “endless reviews and appeals,” not at all uncommon in death penalty cases, and laments that both Mr. Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, earlier condemned to death by a different jury for the same crime, the murder of three women in Cheshire, “are more likely to die of old age before they are executed.” This is true en...

Juries, occasionally rising above the deadening process of the law, will engage in what lawyers call jury nullification. Jury nullification involves putting aside process in favor of justice. Instead of ruling as a judge or the law might wish, a jury occasionally will throw process to the wind and bring in a surprising verdict. Death penalty opponents in Connecticut, some of whom are leaders in the General Assembly and the judicial system, have for the past few decades been practicing what might be called capital felony process nullification. The idea is effectively to vacate jury findings by absurdly extending the legal process in death penalty cases. Such jurists and legislators, reasoning that the death penalty is an abomination – even in cases in which it may be justly applied, such as in multiple murder cases or cases in which a capital felon already sentenced to life in prison takes a life in prison or in terrorist cases or in cases in which the crime is especially heinous – ...

There was a point during the Cheshire murder trial when one of the defense attorneys representing accused murderer Joshua Komisarjevsky became concerned that small pins worn by family members of the murder victims might unduly prejudice the jury against their client. The judge in the case, Jon Blue, ruled that the pins were not so indiscrete as to trip the prejudices of jurors. The pin challenge by the defense followed by some months the publication of an interview Mr. Komisarjevsky gave to a reporter while incarcerated that was, the First Amendment still being the law of the land, widely covered by several state newspapers. The Komisarjevsky prison interview was fashioned into a hastily written book that found its way into libraries across the state. An effort was made, unsuccessfully, to pry the book from the hands of aggressive librarians conversant with the First Amendment. Mr. Komisarjevsky, a very talkative fellow, also made a statement to police shortly after he was appreh...

A demand by Joshua Komisarjevsky’s importunate lawyers that Dr. William Petit, the sole survivor of a murderous attack on his family, should be sequestered during the trial of Mr. Komisarjevsky has not been met by Mr. Petit with a correlative demand that Mr. Komisarjevsky’s lawyers should also be sequestered. Among other things, sequestration might keep their unreasonable demands out of the media and in the courts, where they might be dealt with more swiftly than the unnecessarily prolonged Komisarjevsky case.

Some signs indicate that editors of the Hartford Courant are preparing to endorse Dan Malloy as governor. As governor, Malloy will sign a death penalty abolition bill earlier passed by the General Assembly, which has been dominated these many years by the Democratic Party. The bill abolishing the death penalty -- vetoed by Gov. Jodi Rell, who asserted that the death penalty was appropriate in some cases -- passed the legislature over heated Republican opposition during the assembly’s last session. Incumbent Democrats who signed off on the death penalty abolition bill likely do not expect their numbers in the legislature to be so depleted in the November elections as to make it impossible for a Democratic dominated assembly to pass the bill with Governor Malloy at the helm. In an editorial printed in the Courant three weeks before Election Day, “ Repeal The Death Penalty ,” the paper asserts that the trials of Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky should not be an impediment to the ...

On the question of the death penalty, Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Dan Malloy has decided to stand on principle. His principle may be a little hard for the usual Connecticut pragmatist to discern. The Steven Hayes trial is winding up in New Haven, and on Monday Hayes’ jury will begin deliberations. Hayes, who along with Joshua Komisarjevsky has been accused of murdering an entire family in Cheshire, with the exception of the family’s father who survived the slaughter, is a candidate for execution. The two are accused of breaking into a house in Cheshire, beating with a baseball bat and incapacitating the father of the family, forcing the wife to withdraw money from a bank, raping the wife, raping one of the 14 year-old daughters, dousing her with gasoline and setting the house on fire. Three people died as a result of their crime spree. Hayes more or less acknowledged his part in the murders when he agreed to plead guilty on the condition that state prosecutors would waive ...

It is not likely that Joshua Komisarjevsky, one of the two alleged murderers in the Pettit case, need fear a cell invasion. But the lawyers for his partner in mayhem, Steven Hayes, who along with Komisarjevsky is accused of invading Dr. William Petit’s home and murdering his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and her two daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, now are seeking an arrest warrant for Komisarjevsky. Hayes’ lawyers claim that Komisarjevsky has committed “criminal contempt of court” for having disregarded a judge’s gag order. Principles in the case are under a judge’s instruction not to chat it up before trial for fear the court may not be able to empanel a dispassionate jury. It is supposed by some defense attorneys that if a jury member has read about the events at issue in trial, the juror will be “tainted” and thus unable to render a just verdict. Good judges dispose of the worry by instructing jurors that in their deliberations they may only consider evidence pres...

It is always just a wee bit tricky to use the word “redemption” in connection with capital punishment, because redemption is a religious category. To be redeemed means to be saved. “We are all saved in the blood of the lamb.” This means that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross has saved us from our sins. Presumably those sins may include multiple murders. Catholics believe that sin demands expiation on the part of the sinner; penance is expiation. Protestants believe that good works are not useful in the redemptive scheme; we are redeemed by the grace of God alone. A couple of years ago, according to state prosecutors, two petty criminals, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, both on parole at the time, broke into Dr., William Petit’s house, brutalized the doctor by beating him unconscious with a baseball bat, forced his wife to go to a bank and withdraw cash, raped his wife and daughter, tied his two daughters to a bed and set his house on fire. All the members of Dr. Petit’s family sa...

Connecticut built new prisons several years ago on the assumption that getting serious on crime would deter serious criminals. Prison beds expanded, and they were soon filled. Some on the left have now concluded that punishment does not deter criminals. They are suggesting treatment programs for drug crimes; this, they say, will release more beds for serious criminals and, in the long run save us some money. The question of decriminalization may not be wholly a right, left issue. It’s been more than three years since Bill Buckley , hardly a man of the left, suggested that the use of marijuana for medical relief should be decriminalized. In arguing for limited decriminalization, Buckley suggested that the “stodgy inertia most politicians feel” when they address the issue of limited decriminalization should give way to “a creeping reality.” Buckley noted that “Professor Ethan Nadelmann, of the Drug Policy Alliance, writing in National Review, estimates at 100,000 the number of Americans...