Public Safety And The Woman Who Would Not Be A Victim

"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. Pichette, as might be expected, was clinically graphic. She suffered from skull fractures, a jaw shattered on the right and fractured on the left, five broken ribs, a punctured lung, orbital fractures to both her eyes and a broken nose. It may have been a bookcase or a china cabinet brought down on her that fractured her ribs. Fear and terror brushed some of the details from her mind.

“James had assaulted me many years ago,” Ms. Pichette said, “and was sentenced to one year, I believe. He served six months. A protective order was put in place. Approximately six months after his release, on Dec. 30, 2000, he attempted to take my life. He broke into my house and waited for me to return home. He beat me for hours using anything at his disposal: the china cabinet, the TV, stereo, speakers, his fists, the phone. I sustained extensive serious physical and mental trauma. I had escaped the house twice, but he dragged me back and continued beating me. The third time I escaped the house, a snow plow truck driver saw me on the side of the road in a pool of blood, interceded and saved my life.”

“He was trying to kill me,” Ms. Pichette said. “If he had succeeded, all the hearings that followed would have been unnecessary. I would have been dead. He would have been committed to prison for the rest of his life. End of story.”

But Mr. Bartis’ imprisonment was not the end of the story. In sentencing Mr. Bartis to twenty-five years in prison, suspended after fourteen years, and five years' probation for first-degree assault and unlawful restraint, the late Judge Wollenberg noted both the viciousness of the beating and Mr. Bartis’ previous assault on Ms. Pichette.

  

On October 2, 2013,  Ms. Pichette received an informational notice from the Victim Services Unit of the Department of Correction (DOC):

“RE: Inmate JAMES BARTIS… “On July 1, 2011, the Connecticut General Assembly passed a provision of the Connecticut State Statutes for an incentive plan for inmates to earn credit toward achieving a reduction of their sentence and an early release from incarceration known as the ‘Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program” (RREC). This incentive plan provides for the earning of credit, by compliance with the Inmate’s Accountability Plan, good conduct, obedience to the rules and participation in programs that will prepare the inmate to return to the community.
 “This letter is to inform you that the above named inmate has a sentence that will expire on November 26, 2013 and will no longer be under the jurisdiction of the State of Connecticut Department of Correction. Upon discharge the inmate will discharge to probation.”

The communications Ms. Pichette had received from DOC were, at the very least, confusing. At no time prior to the notices was she made aware that Mr. Bartis had been received into programs that would reduce his sentence, and the letters did not state unequivocally that Mr. Bartis was participating in the RREC program that reduced his sentence by 404 days.

“I didn't feel I was given adequate notice to prepare for my safety, nor do I understand why he was being rewarded this RREC program with his longstanding violent history and the extreme violent nature of his most recent crimes. The man attempted to take my life but was unsuccessful. He let me know he had intended to kill me that night. He made the same statements to both the police and the hospital, which are documented. I understand offenders convicted of murder are not eligible for the RREC program; that is as it should be. James was eligible for the program because he had not successfully killed me. How can we reward violent offenders in this way? The pictures of me that night after the assault are very graphic and show that this was not an incident where I was ‘smacked around a bit.’ He was trying to commit murder, but the fact that he was unsuccessful does not reduce the threat he poses to society.”

After reviewing Mr. Bartis’ entire case, the Head of Probationers discovered information that WAS NOT REPORTED to persons in the DOC charged with making decisions concerning early release. Critical information had been lost in transit to agencies monitoring offenders. Oversights of this kind, Ms. Pichette feels, pose serious safety concerns: “Had Mr. Bartis been released according to the provision of the RREC program and placed on general probation, he would have slipped the very strict conditions of probation ordered by Judge Wollenberg.” Ms. Pichette had been told by the State Prosecuting Attorney's office, "It was one of the strictest terms of probation the Judge had ever imposed."   

The judge’s orders and strict specific conditions of probation had not been forwarded to the probation office: “The assigned probation officer was not aware I was the victim of his previous incarceration six months prior to the current one. The officer didn't know there was a Lifetime Standing Criminal Protective Order in place. Pertinent information the probation officer should have had was not present. She was handed a file that he was to be on general probation.”

This was more serious than the usual bureaucratic goof-up. Because Mr. Bartis’ court file did not follow him through  the usual probation process, the probation board was prepared to make a decision affecting Ms. Pichette’s safety without having at its disposal the necessary data that would have allowed the board to make a proper decision affecting both Ms. Pichette’s personal safety and the public’s safety as well.

As time rolled on, it became clear that the Risk Reduction Earned Credit program -- smuggled in an omnibus implementer bill past the usual legislative oversight committees by its architect, Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Mike Lawlor -- increased rather than reduced risks for victims of violent crimes such as Ms. Pichette.

Since early release credits had been awarded retrospectively to prisoners who had not complied with their Inmate’s Accountability Plan, the bulk of inmates showered with such unmerited rewards had not earned their credits. In addition, the credits were to be made available to violent criminals, including those incarcerated for: threatening in the first degree; strangulation in the second degree; assault in the first degree; assault of an elderly, blind, disabled, pregnant or mentally retarded person in the second degree; promoting prostitution and human trafficking; kidnapping in the first degree – and arson which, following Mr. Bartis’ incarceration, would claim the lives of others in Ms. Pichette extended family. Republican legislators would laterpoint out such fatal defects in Mr. Lawlor’s program – to no avail.

Seven years after Mr. Bartis had been incarcerated for the brutal assault on Ms. Pichette, her cousin’s family was murdered by two men who, Ms. Pichette says, “were wrongly paroled.”

These two worthies were Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, convicted and sentenced for capital murder in December 2011. The two parolees set out from a halfway house, broke into a home in Cheshire, beat into unconsciousness with a baseball bat Dr. William Petit, forced his wife to withdraw money from a bank, raped his wife, raped one of his daughters, and torched the house, murdering both daughters and their mother. Like a modern day Ishmael tossed on the shore from a shattered Pequod, only Mr. Petit was left to tell the tale. Courageously and steadfastly, Dr. Petit persevered through months of trial testimony, at the end of which the two murderers were convicted of capital felony murder and assigned to death row.

A year and four months after the two murderers had been sentenced to death, the Democrat dominated General Assembly, led by Mr. Lawlor and current Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Andrew McDonald -- then the co-chairs of the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee -- abolished the death penalty for all future capital felony crimes, including terrorist acts, serial murders, multiple murders and murders of police officers and prison officials. The cowardly and campaign-conscious General Assembly left the death penalty in force for the eleven prisoners languishing on death row, firmly convinced that no judge in Connecticut would permit the state to execute a convicted capital felon in the absence of a law prescribing capital punishment for convicted murderers.

This is the recent past that hangs threateningly over Ms. Pichette. And it is not over.

It was after the murders in Cheshire had lacerated the soul of her cousin Dr. Petit that Ms. Pichette began to think seriously about penal reform, an avocation she now shares with Mr. Lawlor:

“It was then,” Ms. Pichette says, “that a lot of questions and concerns began to preoccupy me and others regarding the parole process. In June of 2012 Connecticut’s media announced the tragic murder of a store owner by a parolee allowed out of prison early; he supposedly had earned early release credits under the RREC program. It was shocking news. I was under the impression that the parole release program had been ‘revamped’ to protect the public. In October 2013, I was told my ex-boyfriend, who had twice assaulted me, was to be released early and placed on general probation due to time earned under the RREC program. Not what the judge had ordered. I don't understand how a man with a violent history incarcerated for extreme violent crimes was allowed to participate in such a program. It was at that time I found out that his history and the judge's conditions or probation were not presented to his assigned probation officer.”

The past that runs like a living fire through the bones of victims such as Ms. Pichette, a woman of great courage, is only temporarily extinguished by a presumptively firm sentence rendered in a judicial proceeding. All such sentences are seriously distorted by Mr. Lawlor’s Risk Reduction Earned Credit program, the benefits of which were dished out by Mr. Lawlor liberally and indiscriminately to violent prisoners who had never satisfied the requirements of his own program. The distortions of sentences determined by judges after arduous and lengthy trials quicken the fire in the blood. And blood MUST have a voice, heard only by those who take seriously the cry of justice in the oppressed soul.

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.

Lawlor’s Penology And The Corpse At The Hearing

During a public hearing on the state’s new Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program, the informational portion of which was devoted to testimony given by politicians rather than the public, there was a dead body in the room, that of Ibrahim Ghazal, murdered by Frankie “The Razor” Resto shortly after Mr. Resto, a violent criminal, had “earned” early release credits from a program that was the brain child of Mike Lawlor, tapped early in his administration by Governor Dannel Malloy to serve as Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning.

Some of the public figures, notably among them Mr. Lawlor, danced nimbly around the corpse.

Mr. Lawlor, who has been tinkering with penological reform since his days as co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, was able to put some of his ideas into practice after his installation as Connecticut’s prison commissar.

Mr. Lawlor’s career in this regard has been marked by several successes. An early opponent of capital punishment, Mr. Lawlor was doubtless pleased when Connecticut gave up the barbaric practice of putting to death such multiple murderers as Michael Ross. Mr. Ross’ specialty was raping and strangling young women.

Mr. Lawlor, sitting as co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, argued strenuously during an earlier attempt to abolish the death penalty that capital punishment, encumbered as it was by endless appeals, was rarely applied and urged then Governor Jodi Rell “to reach out to our state's prosecutors and judges before taking action. Ask these front-line professionals their off-the-record opinions on whether anyone will ever be executed in Connecticut. I believe that she will be told what many of us have been told - the Connecticut death penalty is a false promise.”

Mr. Lawlor’s view carried some weight when the death penalty was finally abolished by the Democrat dominated General Assembly during the early years of the Malloy administration. Lacking the courage of its convictions, the General Assembly produced a measure that exempted those currently on death row from its humane gesture.

In 2003, Mr. Lawlor told the New York Times he favored "alternative ways of combating overcrowding, like making it harder to put people back in prison for technical violations of their parole,” which could result in re-incarceration, “and argued that transfers should be a last resort.” In response to prison overcrowding in 2004, Mr. Lawlor argued strenuously against the expansion of prisons. So persuasive was Mr. Lawlor that the bill, co-sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats, passed unanimously in the Senate and received only token opposition in the House. “The key,” Mr. Lawlor said at the time, “is to resist doing the simple thing -dumping a bunch of money into a new prison."

Alas, the best laid plans of mice and men are often torn asunder. Following the horrific home invasion and multiple murder in Cheshire -- in the course of which two paroled inmates raped two family members and murdered three people, a mother and two young daughters, by setting a house on fire -- Mr. Lawlor never-the-less continued to stump for early release: “Some people say let's put them all in jail. OK, fine, but that means dramatically increasing taxes or shutting down a bunch of colleges."

During a special session called to enact stiffer penalties for home invasion in 2008 following the murder by arson in Cheshire, a new law was passed making home invasion a class A felony, and the parole board under whose supervision the two convicted Cheshire murderers were released was reformed: In fact, the parole board was decimated; heads rolled. Mr. Lawlor at the time opposed efforts to pass a three strikes law, which was defeated. Had a three strikes and you’re out law been in place before the Cheshire murders, Connecticut would have been spared the necessity of housing on death row two murderers, both of whom had lengthy prison records.

Mr. Lawlor’s Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program is the crown jewel of his career in penological reform. In effect, the program repeals Mr. Lawlor’s earlier momentary setbacks.

The putative therapeutic benefits of the hastily launched, poorly conceived program had little effect on Frankie “The Razor” Resto. “The Razor,” so called because he had for some years been in the business of shaking down drug dealers with a razor, was given early release credits under Mr. Lawlor’s program -- even though, according to testimony given to the Judiciary Committee by newly elected State Senator Dante Bartolomeo, Mr. Resto fought while in prison with other inmates, dealt drugs, burnt his mattress, was in other ways an incorrigable prisoner, and unfortunately was never subject to the non-existent “Three-Strikes” law so ardently opposed by Mr. Lawlor.

The law establishing early release credits was passed October 1, 2011 and made retroactive to April 1 (no joke) 2006. Since the provisions of the bill were applied retroactively to 7,589 prisoners, many critics of the program contended that the applied credits were both UNDESERVED and unjust.

Having cashed in his credits, Mr. Resto acquired a gun, likely NOT from a gun show or an authorized dealer, and murdered Mr. Ghazal, whose son Fapyo, present at the hearing and also severely beaten in an earlier robbery at a different store, must in the future refer to his father forevermore in the past tense.

Speaking for every victim of Mr. Lawlor’s program, past, present and future, Mr. Ghazal’s son said at the hearing press conference,“This guy, he destroyed our life. He destroyed my mom’s life. He destroyed my life.” But by the time the real public spoke, Mr. Lawlor and his retinue of subalterns had left the hearing room relatively certain that Mr. Lawlor's utopian prison reforms would not be torn asunder by an obliging judiciary committee over which he once presided as co-chairmen.

She’s Not Okay

"She's not okay, always crying," said Tharwat, "holding my father's clothes, smelling his clothes, it's not easy."

Tharwat Ghazalis the surviving daughter of 70-year-old Ibrahim Ghazal, who was murdered in an Easy Mart in Meriden on June 27th.

The presumptive murderer of Mr. Tharwat is Frankie Resto, who was given a get-out-of-jail-early card by Democrats in Connecticut’s legislature during the last days of its hectic session.

“A candidate for the state’s new Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program, Connecticut Commentary has noted previously http://donpesci.blogspot.com/2012/07/risky-risk-reduction-earned-credit.html, “Mr. Resto, was given a reduction in his sentence. The legislation that created the program was made retroactive by the Democratic dominated legislature, which means its provision applied to prisoners serving time before the bill’s enactment."

Accused store owner killer was let out of jail early: wwlp.com

The Risky Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program

On July 6, two days after Independence Day, the children of Meriden store owner Ibraham Ghazal were featured in the Meriden Record Journal. Very likely they would have preferred to remain in obscurity, but the murder of their father had thrust notoriety upon them.

A little more than a week earlier, the father of Tamer and Tharwat Ghazal had been shot and killed in the store he owned with a partner by a gunman who, it later was determined, had been a candidate for a Risk Reduction Credit Program passed into law by the General Assembly at the end of its hectic session.

Tamer Ghazal, an attorney from Jordan, was reluctant to talk about the murder. But when he was told by the paper’s reporter that the likely gunman who had killed his father had been released from prison without having served his full sentence for an earlier robbery, he asked, “How did he get out early?”

A bewildered store clerk working the cash register at the EZ Mart during the crime – Mr. Ghazal surrendered the cash on demand but was murdered anyway – observed, “He should not be walking the streets. How can they leave him this way? He is a dangerous man.”

Sentenced for first degree robbery in January 2007 to thirteen years in prison -- suspended after six and a quarter years -- and three years probation, Frankie Resto, later arrested as the gunman, had been released from prison on April 12, seven months before his term was due to expire.

A candidate for the state’s new Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program, Mr. Resto, was given a reduction in his sentence. The legislation that created the program was made retroactive by the Democratic dominated legislature, which means its provision applied to prisoners serving time before the bill’s enactment.

The answer to Mr. Tharwat’s question very likely will not please him. Mr. Resto was let free seven months before his due date for release because the General Assembly – some say to reduce prison costs at a time when the state’s budget is once again in arrears – wrote into law a program that permits violent criminals to shave time off their sentences for good behavior while in prison.

Undersecretary for criminal justice policy at the state Office of Policy and Management Michael Lawlor has said that the new Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program simply moves the date of parole, and he pointed out that not everyone is offered parole, news that is not likely to comfort the children of Mr. Ghazal.

Mr. Resto, said Mr. Lawlor, was flagged as a high-risk inmate and served 91 percent of his sentence. Under the old dispensation, he would have been released earlier: “If we went back to the way it was a year ago, he would have gotten out earlier. We prefer a system where we identify who is a higher risk and they serve a larger portion of their sentence. Had he gotten no credits he would have served three or four months longer. But under the old system, he would have been paroled earlier.” One of the purposes of the new bill, Mr. Lawlor said, was to reduce recidivism, a purpose wasted upon Mr. Resto.

Any connection between recidivism and the state’s new Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program may not be obvious to the children of Mr. Ghazal – or, indeed, anyone else. Is Mr. Lawlor seriously suggesting that a program designed to reduce risks to prison officials posed by the unacceptable behavior of those in prison will also reduce the possibility of repetitive criminal activity when released prisoners are no longer under the jurisdiction of prison administrators? Do the names Hayes and Komisarjevsky ring a bell? Is it possible that Mr. Lawlor and Mr. Malloy, a former prosecutor, do not understand that prisoners are called “cons” for good reason?

Len Suzio, a state Senator whose district includes Meriden, said that the crime “underscores a problem with this new law. How could he have gotten out early? He earned those credits. How could a guy with such a violent record get those credits?”

Mr. Suzio’s view that violent criminals should not be eligible for the program struck a responsive chord with his Democratic opponent in the 13th District Senate race, Dante Bartolomeo, who agreed that “It shouldn’t be used for violent offenders. Clearly this gentleman should not have been released early.”

Perhaps on behalf of the children of the murdered Mr. Ghazal, Ms. Bartolomeo might have a word with Mr. Lawlor, who might just want to plant a word in Governor Dannel Malloy’s ear. The most partisan governor in two decades, Mr. Malloy has not been receptive to suggestions made by Republicans.

A governor intent on giving prison administrators tools he hopes may create a more manageable prison environment never-the-less is constitutionally obligated to protect the public from murderers, rapists and other violent criminals bent on mayhem. The FIRST and most important duty of a government is to protect its citizens from violent predators whose sentences should never have been reduced to accommodate prison officials.