Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The old saw has it that “exceptions prove the rule.” They prove the rule precisely because they are exceptions. In Connecticut’s politicized Supreme Court, exceptions have BECOME the rule. That is what happened when Justice Richard Palmer constructed his decision on the Constitutionality of Connecticut’s death penalty on a dissent in Glossip v. Gross , a case in which a challenge to the death penalty on Constitutional grounds had been denied by the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol. The decision was a narrow one, but Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg managed in their dissent to import larger issues.

Thanks to a decision made by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, transcripts of usually closed-door proceedings by the ultra secretive Judicial Review Council have been made public. Blumenthal’s decision that the council’s investigatory records must be made public after the council determines it has sufficient evidence to bring charges has opened a small window into the council’s deliberations and findings. No one yet has asked Blumenthal whether his decision will apply retrospectively to previous Judicial Review Council investigations. In any case, Blumenthal’s decision opens the doors wide to a case involving State Supreme Court intrigue that previously had been bathed in the half-light of secret deliberations – and the resulting disclosures are not pretty. According to the transcripts of the council’s deliberations, Justice Richard Palmer learned on April 8 from a law clerk’s query that Supreme Court Chief Justice William Sullivan had placed a hold on the publication of a decision ...