Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

There are some wounds time won’t heal. Such is the murder of three members of Dr. William Petit’s household. The household -- Dr. Petit, his wife and two daughters – was attacked by two career criminals, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, both on parole. A recent news story – “Second look, A Year After Cheshire Home Invasion, William Petit Speaks Up For Tougher Crime Laws” – pithily describes what happened: “On a July night in 2007, intruders clubbed and trussed Petit at his home in Cheshire, the start of an ordeal that ended with the deaths of his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and their daughters, Hayley, 17, and 12-year-old Michaela. “Hawke-Petit and Michaela were raped. The mother was strangled. Both daughters were left bound in their beds, the house doused with gasoline and set afire.” The scene of the crime has since disappeared. Where before there was a house and a family, now there is nothing. The erasure process, sometimes confused with a healing process, has now be...

“And I alone am left to tell the tale” – Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick According to a news report , the judiciary committee, presided over by chairmen Michael Lawlor in the House and Andrew McDonald in the senate, both lawyers, had been tossing around the question whether the legislature should abolish Connecticut’s death penalty for about eight hours when the proverbial skunk showed up at the garden party. Connecticut’s chief public defender, Susan Storey, testified that the death penalty was a drain on state resources and did not deter crime. Other speakers came forward and said that capital punishment was immoral. Co-chairman of the committee Michael Lawlor said earlier in a press interview before the hearing, "No one's going to be executed in Connecticut unless they want to be executed. This is really a fraud of a public policy." Mr. Lawlor was referring indirectly to the execution of serial killer Michael Ross , whose trial and execution took an inordinatel...

A decent time having elapsed, sort of, since two multiple murderers had been sentenced to death for having 1) beaten with a baseball bat a husband of a family in Cheshire, 2) forced the husband’s wife to travel to a bank to withdraw funds for the two murderers, 3) raped the wife and one of the daughters, 4) bound the daughters to their beds, 5) set fire to the house, murdering the daughters and their mother, anti-death penalty legislators in the General Assembly are planning once again to file a bill that would prospectively abolish the death penalty, replacing it with a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. Prospective abolition would leave intact the 11 death penalty sentences of the murderers awaiting justice on Connecticut’s death row. Such a bill would leave intact the legislature’s power to commute death penalty sentences to life in prison at any time after the General Assembly had abolished the death penalty. Unlike most states, the pardon power in Connect...

Governor Dannel Malloy’s Nominee for Chief Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, Justice Andrew McDonald, was sent to the General Assembly with a negative recommendation. The nomination  passed in the House by one vote, where Democrats have a six member edge over Republicans, and is now headed towards the Senate, which is split 18-18 among Democrats and Republicans. The Republican leader in the Senate, Len Fasano, said on a radio talk show recently that he is inclined to vote down the nomination.  After viewing all McDonald's opinions -- and also interviewing McDonald -- Fasano feels that McDonald is prone to affirming a possibly flawed decision if the decision contains a partial narrative that supports his apriori views. For instance, McDonald believes that the death penalty may be racist because it falls disproportionately on blacks, a doubtful datum. If a decision to abolish the death penalty supported that view, McDonald would be inclined to support it. That mo...

A picture, it is often said, is worth a thousand words. In the case of a picture on the front page of a newspaper captioned “After Newtown,” the picture may be worth a thousand dead end arguments. The photo shows parents and children milling in the hallway of Henry Barnard Elementary School in Enfield on the first day of school. A bright yellow banner greets the students: “Welcome Back!” In the foreground of the picture, Kevin Hart, “one of the guards stationed at every Enfield school this year,” stands watch, his hands folded in front of him and a gun strapped to his hip. Mr. Hart is “a retired Hartford police officer hired as a monitor for Henry Barnard.” But for the pistol, he is inconspicuous and would arouse no notice.

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...

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...

Never letting a crisis go to waste, Democrats who favor national restrictions on guns have turned the assault in San Bernardino in the direction of gun control laws they favor. If U.S. Senator Chris Murphy is not leading the pack, he is barking loudly with the other hounds. A day after the terrorist attack in California, Mr. Murphy tweeted to the world, “ Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing - again.” The Murphy tweet produced others chastising the Senator for devaluing prayer. But Mr. Murphy’s tweet was not so much an assault on the efficacy of prayer as it was a case of purposeful campaign posturing; tweeting brings out the worst in many of us. If people are unwilling to do something to stop the carnage, Mr. Murphy seemed to be saying, “their ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness.” Mr. Murphy did not say in his initial tweet who should be forgiven or why (Baathist tyrants in Syria? Isla...

Vice President Joe Biden came to Connecticut for two reasons: to raise money – this is, after all, election season – and to fist bump Governor Dannel Malloy. Mr. Biden had hardly arrived in the state when some faithful Democrats began to wonder whether Mr. Malloy had fallen out of favor with the White House. Why dispatch to such a faithful state a second string, gaff prone VP? Where was President Barack Obama?

"The past is never dead. It's not even past"  – William Faulkner Faulkner’s notion that we drag the past into the present with us in order to plot our futures is just common sense. In our life’s play, perhaps the most important character, ever-present but invisible, is the lived and remembered past. We learn from the past because we do not wish to be doomed to repeat fatal errors. And this applies in a darker sense to those who have suffered grievous wrongs. The moment is never far from them, and sometimes the moment, if you are a woman who has suffered a vicious assault, is present as a recalled event, a haunting ever present horror and a future possibility. After Deanna Pichette was assaulted by James Bartis III in December 2000, she was immediately hospitalized. This was the second go-around for Mr. Bartis, who had served six months in prison for a prior assault on Ms. Pichette, then his girlfriend. The hospital report on the injuries sustained by Ms. Pi...

“The 'most prolific' serial killer in U.S. history” has now been sentenced to death, according to  a report in the Daily Mail . It is suspected that Rodney Alcala, whose picture is shown here, murdered upwards of 130 young girls and women. Alcala is due to be executed by lethal injection for the murders of a twelve year old girl and four women. He has admitted killing another 30 women in the 1970’s. An amateur photographer, Alcala left behind hundreds of pictures of women, some of whom were his victims. “He committed unspeakable acts of horror,” said prosecutor Matt Murphy, “He gets off on the infliction of pain on other people. He's an evil monster who knows what he is doing is wrong and doesn't care.” Detective Claiff Shepard places Alcala “right up somewhere below Hitler and right around Ted Bundy. It is not humane what he does to these victims. It is torture.” Alcala raped his victims, strangled them until they lapsed into unconsciousness, then revived them ...

I selected him at random out of a crowd at the rally numbering about a thousand, according to the head counters, though the crowd seemed larger than that to me. He was, I would guess, about 50+ years, dressed for warmth, as was most of the crowd on this cold mid-January day. We were slightly pressed together, people bustling and talking on all sides of us. The crowd stretched the entire length of the Capital building and was deep enough so that those on the edge spilled across the driveway and parking lot, some standing on the grass on the North side of the Capital. As most people who have over the years participated in rallies well know, this is the cold side of the grounds. For present purposes, we’ll call him Mr. Easton, the town he hailed from. I purposely did not ask him his name, neither did I identify myself as a political writer. If you want a canned response from a member of a crowd at a rally – any rally – you have only to identify yourself as a media person . I had not ...

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.

I n 2012, Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly abolished capital punishment but carved out an exception for convicted murderers awaiting the death penalty on death row. The carve-out for the eleven death row prisoners was a blatant violation of what used to be called the natural law, a series of political, philosophical and penological assumptions that informs all laws, statutory and constitutional. The abolition should have been applied retroactively to Connecticut prisoners awaiting death, for reasons lucidly stated by Samuel Johnson when he was reporting on debates in the House of Commons. The Nulla poena sine lege  doctrine -- “where there is no law, there is no transgression” – Mr. Johnson wrote, “is a maxim not only established by universal consent, but in itself evident and undeniable; and it is, Sir, surely no less certain that where there is no transgression, there can be no punishment.” By abolishing the death penalty yet leaving the penalty in forc...

Early in June, 2009, the state legislature passed a bill abolishing the death penalty that was vetoed by Governor Jodi Rell, who said she thought the present law was just in the cases in which it had been applied in Connecticut. Although a number of convicted killers are awaiting punishment on death row -- among them Daniel Webb, sentenced to death in 1991 for having brutally raped and murdered a bank executive in a park in Hartford -- the state has executed only two people within living memory: Ross and Joseph “Mad Dog” Taborsky in 1960, who has the distinction of being the only convict in Connecticut sent to death row twice for different crimes. Webb recently beat a guard severely enough to require medical attention. The bill abolishing the death penalty was passed after two convicted criminals released from prison, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, broke into a home in Cheshire, beat Dr. William Petit unconscious with a baseball bat, raped his wife and one of his daughters,...

In 2012, the Democrat majority in the General Assembly abolished Connecticut’s death penalty while leaving the penalty operative for the 11 convicted murderers on death row, thus demolishing all their moral arguments against capital punishment. If the death penalty is cruel, unusual and morally indefensible, would it not be doubly inappropriate for convicted death row inmates? Hours before the bill was passed, this writer remarked : “The inevitable passage of the bill will unleash a flood of appeals that will at a minimum further delay the executions of Connecticut’s 11 death row inmates. It is almost certain that at some point in the future a Democratic dominated legislature supported by a Democratic governor, all of whom will have been instrumental in abolishing the death penalty, would be morally derelict in resisting the commutation of the death sentences of the 11 prisoners now awaiting execution on death row. The death penalty having been abolished for prospectiv...

Chris Powell, over at the Journal Inquirer , has responded thoughtfully to what has been mislabeled the “tragedy” in Cheshire. Actually, it was a multiple rape and murder and a tragedy only for the victims who could not avoid the unwelcome attentions of the two rapists and murderers who decimated Dr. William Petit’s family. Connecticut’s so called “three Strikes and You’re Out” legislation is little more than a pretense at law and order. The law, Powell writes, “merely allows prosecutors to seek and courts to impose life sentences when someone is convicted of a third violent felony. Connecticut law also merely allows prosecutors to seek and courts to impose a doubled sentence on people convicted of a second felony.’ There are no mandated requirements in the law. In practice – the only true measurement of the effectiveness of laws – Connecticut, Powell says, “is infinitely indulgent -- as are many state legislators surveyed about what happened in Cheshire. “That is, what Connecticut cal...

Are we more safe now than we were before Governor Dannel Malloy’s prison czar, Michael Lawlor, began handing out get-out-of-jail-early credits to so called “nonviolent” incarcerated criminals? Ibraham Ghazal, the co-owner of an EZMart in Meriden, was not safe. Mr. Ghazal was murdered by Frankie Resto, a prisoner released early because the benefits of Mr. Lawlor’s program had been disbursed retroactively and not prospectively to Connecticut prisoners -- including rapists, which Mr. Lawlor evidently did not consider a violent crime. Death has its privileges, and Mr. Ghazal is now safe.

“The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning”-- Adlai Stevenson In her most recent press release, one can almost see state Democratic Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo ticking off the “made in Washington” campaign talking points: Boughton, “war on women,” check. Boughton,” anti-gay,” check. Boughton, “Tea Party,” check. Boughton, “extremist,” check. A busy demagogue, Ms. DiNardo usually is able to mold her mud pies into brief media bites at a moment’s notice. Here is the core of her media release :

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...