The Coming Campaign And Public Safety

In an effort to reduce the recidivism rate in Connecticut, Michael Lawlor, Governor Dannel Malloy’s crime and punishment czar, three years ago instituted a new bright idea called the Risk Reduction Earned Credits program.

Republicans in the General Assembly, easily ignored by the governor and majority Democrats, were quick to point out the program’s glaring and dangerous deficiencies. Mr. Lawlor had smuggled the program past the usual committee watchdogs in the legislature in an end-of-the-year omnibus implementer bill, a dodge that curtailed both legislative review and public comment.

Mr. Lawlor’s program, putatively therapeutic, requires inmates to jump through certain hoops – behave well in prison, take certain courses thought to be rehabilitative by some, etc. – after which they are awarded get-out-of-jail-early credits. The credits, however, were applied retroactively to inmates who had not been exposed to the curative effects of Mr. Lawlor’s program.

Two criminals who were awarded early release credits acquired weapons upon their release -- apparently in violation of the state’s gun control laws -- and murdered two people in separate incidents in the course of two robberies.

Marginalized Republicans called for a reform of the program; they had hoped to restrict the awards of credits only to non-violent convicted criminals and were particularly upset that rapists, among other violent criminals, were not excluded from Mr. Lawlor’s benefices.

A Republican state senator who requested from Mr. Lawlor data showing that his program had reduced the recidivism rate in Connecticut prisons was rebuffed, and a Connecticut Victims Advocate who, in the course of providing the usual services to family members of a co-owner of an EZMart store in Meriden, shot to death by a graduate of Mr. Lawlor’s Risk Reduction Earned Credits program, was summarily dismissed and replaced by a Victims Advocate more amenable to Mr. Lawlor and Mr. Malloy.

Since the principal rational for Mr. Lawlor’s problem ridden program was to reduce the recidivism rate, Republicans during the upcoming elections might reasonably insist that Mr. Malloy order his subordinate to review his brain-child and correct its deficiencies – this time in public during an appropriate legislative committee review.

Trustworthy and scholarly papers on recidivism rates find that shorter, determinate sentences and a more rapid judicial response to crime reduce the likelihood of a return to prison. Mr. Lawlor’s program marches in exactly the opposite direction to a much different drummer.

This election year, Connecticut Republicans – and especially those running for office in urban areas most affected by criminals resistant to Mr. Lawlor’s therapeutic penology – may profitably make public safety an issue in their campaigns. A coherent program that seeks to reduce recidivism might entail shorter, determinate sentences for non-violent crimes. Prison officials then could be given the option of lengthening rather than reducing sentences for all non-violent convicted criminals who abide by the terms of their incarceration.

Capital punishment in Connecticut should be reinstituted for those who commit terrorist acts, multiple murders and fatal assaults on law enforcement officers.

Before he was elevated by Mr. Malloy to his present position as prison czar, Mr. Lawlor and his Democratic comrade in the state Senate Andrew McDonald, recently appointed to the Connecticut’s Supreme Court after having been nominated to the post by Mr. Malloy, were for many years co-chairs of the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee. As such, both spearheaded the successful attempt to eliminate the death penalty in Connecticut  – as it happened, four years after two paroled prisoners descended upon a house in Cheshire, beat the husband of the household unconscious with a baseball bat, raped his wife and daughter, and set the house on fire, murdering three people. The death penalty was abolished eight months before Adam Lanza murdered twenty six people in Sandy Hook, most of them innocent school children. Mr. Lanza committed suicide but, had he been taken alive, he could not have been executed under Connecticut law for his crime.

The same Democrats in the General Assembly who abolished the death penalty, inserted in their abolition bill a highly questionable and perhaps unconstitutional provision that retains the death penalty for the eleven prisoners already condemned to death. The exemption was little more than political window dressing that permitted those opposed to a death penalty to abolish a law while retaining the law’s punishment in the case of 11 murderers less popular with potential voters than were the death penalty abolitionists in the General Assembly. As a result of gubernatorial and legislative cowardice, the state of Connecticut is now prepared to put to death 11 men in the absence of a law authorizing a death penalty – thanks to Mr. Lawlor, Judge McDonald, Mr. Malloy and General Assembly Democrats.

Connecticut may be stuck with Judge McDonald’s questionable judgment, though Republicans this year running for governor should insist that the Supreme Court Justice recuse himself in any case touching upon HIS work in the legislature, but Republicans candidates for governor may not be out of order in insisting that, should they be elected, Mr. Lawlor’s career in penology may be abolished – like the death penalty.

Gray Might Face Questions

Kevin Rennie, a Hartford Courant columnist, writes on his blog “Daily Ructions” that Charles Gray, the “spouse of Governor Dannel P. Malloy’s legal counsel and former Pullman & Comley lawyer Andrew McDonald,” might expect a few questions concerning “the details of his relationship with Pullman & Comley, when he appears before the Executive and Legislative Nominations Committee on Thursday at noon to his nomination to the CAA [Connecticut Airport Authority].”

According to Mr. Rennie:

“Pullman & Comley had more than a good friend in the room when the Connecticut Airport Authority rejected considerably lower bids from two other firms and hired the Bridgeport-based law firm to serve as its counsel. It had a former client in authority member Charles Gray, spouse of Governor Dannel P. Malloy’s legal counsel and former Pullman & Comley lawyer Andrew McDonald.”

Malloy And The Supremes

Taking his education reform show on the road, Governor Dannel Malloy on Thursday crashed into former Bridgeport Board of Education member Maria Pereira, one of the plaintiffs in a successful suit that overturned the dismantling of a Bridgeport Board of Education.

"On Tuesday, the Supreme Court overturned your administration's illegal takeover of the Bridgeport Board of Education," Mrs. Pereira told Mr. Malloy in a packed room at the Village South Center for Community Life in Hartford, "and I want to know if your plans to reform our schools are all about disenfranchising parents in schools all over the state like you're attempting to do in Bridgeport?"

Mr. Malloy attempted to deflect the question by asking Ms. Pereira, “How happy are you with the Bridgeport schools?"

Ms. Pereira acknowledged that the school system could use improvement. “No, the Bridgeport Board of Education hasn’t done a good job in the last 20 years,” she responded. “It’s been controlled by Democrats, that’s why. This is a democracy, not tyranny.” Ms. Pereira quickly turned the conversation back to its original track: “For you to say that we don't have the intelligence to have Bridgeport voters do the right thing …this is democracy, not tyranny."

“When Pereira was done speaking,” according to a report in CTNewsJunkie, “Malloy began to respond. When Pereira tried to interject, the governor told her she was done speaking at that point and went on to explain his position regarding the Bridgeport Public Schools.”

“Tyranny,” Mr. Malloy responded, “is sending the children to a school, year after year after year, knowing that it is performing at a rate that will not allow the vast majority of children … to compete." The governor aimed a well-deserved kick in the pants to the board of education that had been illegally supplanted with his approval. The governor said he didn’t want the state to take over failing school districts, but "Your school board basically threw up their hands and ran away."

The Supreme Court days earlier had ruled that the Malloy administration violated state law when it took over the board’s operations, purging the board without having first initiated the required retraining of the members it replaced before the takeover. Justice Peter Zarella, who authored the majority opinion, wrote that the State Board of Education “does not have the authority to authorize reconstitution until it first requires the local board to undergo and complete training.”

The court’s decision, the governor said, was “undoubtedly right," after which Mr. Malloy, almost reflexively, hustled any responsibility for illegal actions out the back door: “The prior education commissioner should have made sure that should have been done.” The present Commissioner of Education, Stefan Pryor, began his term on October 1 2011, six months before the Malloy administration disbanded the Bridgeport Board of Education, time enough, one would suppose, to allow Mr. Pryor to consult with Mr. Malloy's General Counsel, Andrew J. McDonald, who having served in the state Senate from 2003 to 2011 is no stranger to proper legislative processes.

Following the Supreme Court’s nearly unanimous decision, Mayor of Bridgeport Bill Finch urged the governor and others to circumvent the court’s ruling through a bill that “fixed” the court’s objection by means of a questionable legislative maneuver. If the law could be changed retroactively so as to apply to board members already discharged, the governor need not be put to the trouble of complying with the court decision by a) re-installing the original dismissed board, b) retraining defective members of the board, and c) reconstituting the board as necessary after the legal proprieties have been observed.

The difficulty with the shortcut being tossed around by the governor and legislators is that Supreme Court justices, as a rule, do not appreciate questionable legislative circumventions of their most recent “undoubtedly right” rulings. The court did not rule substantively on the underlying constitutional question that lawyer Norm Pattis is likely to press if the decision of the court is effectively circumvented by political legerdemain: May a constitutionally authorized democratic process of election be subverted by the governor of the state?

The court’s recent ruling presages serious difficulties with the Malloy administration educational reform package. The Malloy reform package, which seems to promise a speedy resolution to the problem of incompetent teachers, also holds out to replaceable teachers a process that would require retraining and reevaluation before discharge. If teacher tenure may be regarded as the shut door in a unionized closed shop, the retraining of incompetent teachers is the lock on that door. The provision in Mr. Malloy’s reform package that would require retaining before dismissal would, like teacher tenure itself, inhibit for long periods of time a necessary corrective to the “tyranny” the governor inveighed against in his remarks to Ms. Pereira.

David Faces Goliath

In any public scuffle between a lowly lawyer and the Malloy administration, one would ordinarily cast the lawyer in the role of David, slingshot at the ready.

But in this case, Rich Rochlin – who, we are told, toiled in obscurity until he, a bit like David, bumped into Goliath – has some physical characteristics that one of Malloy’s men, the formidable Roy Occhiogrosso, finds amusing.

Mr. Occhiogrosso, who during his long and eventful career toiled more or less in obscurity before he joined forces with Goliath, does not hold back. An aide to Mr. Malloy has attributed to Mr. Occhiogrosso a remark that Mr. Rochlin “seems not to be playing with a full deck.''

In one scene recorded for posterity by journalistic embed Ted Mann, an able reporter for the Hearst chain of newspapers, Tim Bannon, Mr. Malloy’s Chief of Staff, receives from Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo’s chief aide a salty response to Mr. Malloy’s persistent criticism of Mr. Cuomo: “We operate on two speeds here: Get along, and kill." Mr. Occhiogrosso seems to have internalized the aide’s operative principle:

“The guy is everybody’s worst impression of a lawyer,’’ Occhiogrosso said of Mr. Rochlin. “He’s like a cartoon character. Hopefully, this guy’s 15 minutes of fame are up soon. … There are several pieces of silverware missing from the drawer. As to what happens to Rich Rochlin, hopefully he just goes away. He’s achieved his objective. This has been a fairly unusual and odd marketing campaign. We’re done dealing with him.’’

Mr. Roachlin is representing a handful of state workers vilified in the media for having allegedly – an investigation is underway – fraudulently applied for a federal handout following Connecticut’s freak snow storm in November.

Mr. Roachlin has been described in some media accounts as “a colorful character with a beard,” a “hard-charging lawyer who has hurled rhetorical bombs at Malloy and his aides in an unorthodox style that included showing up at Malloy’s press conference,” a “newcomer to politics,” unlike Mr. Occhiogrosso, also a colorful character who began his long and eventful career politics and a union “go-fer” tutored by Leo Canty, the union impresario still battling, after all these years, Connecticut’s governmental Goliath.

Mr. Roachlin has been characterized by Mr. Occhiogrosso current boss, the media shy Governor Dannel Goliath, as “a $250-per-hour lawyer who would say whatever was necessary to help his clients,” somewhat like Andrew McDonald, the governor’s current Legal Counsel or Michael Lawlor, the governor’s Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning, both of whom are gold plated lawyers. Mr. Malloy also has a law degree.

Much to his credit, Mr. Occhiogrosso has been spared the indignity of attending law school or representing clients before the bar. When Mr. Occhiogrosso needs to lawyer-up, he hires one.

Chris Keating, a Hartford Courant reporter and one of its best diggers, disclosed in his report that Mr. Occhiogrosso had once hired the “cartoon character” to represent him in a legal dispute Mr. Occhiogrosso had with a contractor who, given Mr. Occhiogrosso operational principles, one hopes is still alive.

Mr. Roachlin, enjoying his 15 minutes of fame, has returned Mr. Occhiogrosso’s fire:

“Roy is on my marketing team. He keeps extending my 15 minutes by 10 minutes every night. I thought he was a pro, but he’s getting schooled by a novice, so I feel for him. I thought this guy was a pro. This is amateur hour. It’s like he just came out of an online school for communications. How pathetic. If he needs advice on how to personally attack me, he has my number. He’s keeping me in the news. I thank him for that. … He’s making all the classic mistakes. My clients’ story is getting out. The governor’s administration is being exposed as incompetent. The governor won’t look at the evidence, so we have to keep talking about it.’’

The out-take message for Goliath might very well be: Don’t sweat the small stuff; save the howitzers for the big guys.