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.

Connecticut’s Social Gospel

What might be called Connecticut’s social gospel is prospering under the hand of progressive Governor Dannel Malloy. Should anyone doubt that Mr. Malloy is a born again progressive, he has only to pay heed to remarks the governor made at a progressive panel discussion in Washington D.C., the epicenter of modern Democratic progressivism.

When president CEO of the Center for American Progress John Podesta, former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, asked Mr. Malloy to display his progressive credentials, the governor unscrolled a partial list that included:

• The passage of Connecticut’s new earned income tax credit program

• The decriminalization of marijuana use in small portions, “the third most robust of its kind in the country,” according to CTNewsJunkie

• The passage of a law providing in-state public college tuition rates to undocumented Connecticut students

• A new law outlawing discrimination against transgendered individuals

• The implementation within the Department of Correction of a new risk reduction credit program that some think will reduce prisoner recidivism

• An executive order that provides a path for state child care workers and personal care attendants to unionize

• And, not mentioned by Mr. Malloy at the progressive conference, a pledge to sign a bill abolishing Connecticut’s death penalty

A bill abolishing the death penalty was presented during the administration of Mr. Malloy’s predecessor, Jodi Rell, who vetoed the bill. That attempt arrived on the heels of Michael Ross’ murder spree. The bill Mr. Malloy has pledged to sign will be presented following a particularly horrific crime in Cheshire.

Mr. Malloy’s crowning achievement was the passage of Connecticut’s paid sick day law.

“This year,” CTNewsJunkie reported, “Connecticut became the first state in the nation to pass a law mandating some employers provide paid time off for workers when they are ill.”

A pleased Mr. Malloy told the gathering of progressives, “So it was, I think, a pretty progressive agenda,” the passage of which was made easier by a General Assembly dominated by like-minded progressive Democrats.

The progressive social gospel in Connecticut is eclectic and politically pragmatic, its doxology wedded to no firm principles. This makes the gospel infinitely elastic. The same governor who on Monday raises taxes both on businesses and individuals can on Tuesday appear before a union group and assure them that at heart he is Samuel Gompers, which is reasonable enough. But then to reappear on Wednesday before yet another business group to sooth and stroke them with his plan to create jobs is a bit of a stretch for most chamber of commerce types who may have graduated from Capitalist University. The disjunctions do not seem to trouble Mr. Malloy, and indeed, once economic prosperity is coupled with crony capitalism the disjunctions disappear altogether. If job production is dependent on governors who pick and choose economic winners and losers, capitalists are reduced to beggars at the throne, and those who cozy up to power win the spoils. The invisible hand of commerce rewards entrepreneurs according to merit, which is determined by consumers who vote for products with their dollars. The visible hand of crony capitalism rewards political benefactors, the prizes being given out by politicians most of whom have never met a payroll or employed a worker who was not on the public dole.

When political parties did this sort of thing during the real progressive era, progressives and muckrakers in the media made it a point to inveigh against both the crony capitalists and governors and presidents who fed them from the public trough. The whole point of progressivism Teddy Roosevelt style was to bust up monopolies created by an alliance between powerful businessmen and politicians. Even Mr. Roosevelt, the scourge of monopolists, agreed to waive the Sherman Antitrust Act during the panic of 1907 so that U.S. Steel, owned by acquisition maestro J. Pierpont Morgan, could acquire Tennessee Coal & Iron (TC&I) to avert a Wall Street collapse of companies too big to fail.

That was then. Modern day Pierpont Morgans are made in Washington – and in the states by progressive governors who lavish upon them tax money in amounts that would bring a blush to the cheek of Mr. Morgan.

Common Sense And Capital Punishment

Following are some points made to a legislative committee considering the abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut and its replacement by life in prison without the possibility of parole, along with some common sense comments:

Capital punishment entails a grave and present danger that the innocent will be convicted and executed. There is no evidence of this in Connecticut in the modern period. Only two people have suffered capital punishment in the last half decade: Joseph “Mad Dog” Taborsky and Michael Ross. There is no question that both were guilty; which is to say, both committed the crimes of which they were accused. Mr. Taborsky, executed in 1960 for capital felonies committed in 1950, killed six people and shot, pistol whipped or injured others in a series of particularly henious crimes that became known at the time as “The Mad Dog Killings.” Mr. Ross was executed in 2005 after having been convicted of the rapes and strangulations of several young women. Mr. Ross’ last two victims were 14 years old; he raped and strangled one of the young girls while the other, incapacitated in the back seat of his car, was forced to watch. Then he killed her as well.

Capital punishment is cruel and unusual. That is a matter of public sentiment, which changes according to circumstances. As a general rule, a majority of Connecticut citizens would not agree that the form of capital punishment employed in Connecticut, death by injection, is cruel. It may be argued that capital punishment is “unusual,” if by the term one means rarely employed, or employed only when certain circumstances are met. In the case of the two criminals executed in Connecticut, both were multiple murderers; both were vicious criminals; and both certainly did commit the crimes of which they had been accused.

Capital punishment is not a deterrent. To misquote former President Bill Clinton, it all depends on what one means by “deterrent.” That argument may proceed until doomsday without effective resolution. In crimes of passion, there is some evidence to suggest that capital punishment would not deter people from committing murder. In deliberate crimes, murders are either accidental, in the precise sense of the term, or intentional. In both cases, it may be impossible to measure scientifically the deterrent value of capital punishment, since the person deterred would be a future capital felon. How is one to gather scientific information from people who may or may not in the future commit capitol felonies? The thing is not possible. It seems reasonable to assert that punishment deters, and those who insist it does not are really arguing in favor of the abolition of all forms of punishment, including slapping the hands of children who steal from cookie jars. The most one may reasonably say is that life in prison without parole AND capital punishment both may deter future crimes committed by the person punished, one more effectively than the other, since it is possible for prisoners to commit crimes while in prison, while it is not possible for an expired person to flout the law.

Capital Punishment is a form of vengeance, rather than a form of justice. Those who make this claim ought to be asked to distinguish between acts of vengeance and acts of justice. Some people believe they receive parking tickets because police officers are vengeful; others believe judges impose sentences because judges are vengeful. Generally speaking, most of us may feel a judicial process is not a form of vengeance if it includes: a) a police investigation, b) an arraignment before a judge, c) a trial before a jury, d) the rendering of a verdict after due deliberation, e) sentencing before a judge, f) yet another trial before a jury to determine the whether the capital punishment sentence is appropriate, g) an affirmation of the sentence, occasionally by a different jury, and… appeals as numerous as stars in the celestial vault. In fact, the time distance between original conviction and final disposition in Connecticut is so lengthy that former co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee and criminal justice professor Michael Lawlor advanced the thesis, before he was tapped by Governor Dannel Malloy to serve as undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning at the Office of Policy and Management, that in the post-Ross period no one in Connecticut found guilty of capital punishment would be so punished unless they, like Mr. Ross, “want to die.” Vengeance, on the other hand, is what happens when a couple of modern day Huns descend on a family, incapacitate the father by tying him up in the basement and beating him with a baseball bat, take the mother to a bank and force her to withdraw money, rape one of the daughters of the family, rape the mother and kill all in the house but the father, who miraculously escapes, by setting fire to the victims in order to cover up the crime. Such deliberately cruel and unusual deeds smack of vengeance, whether directed at the victims or at society through the victims.

Capital punishment is prohibitively expensive. It isn’t.

The capital punishment process takes too severe an emotional toll on the family members of victims to justify its imposition. The emotional toll can be reduced by streamlining the process.

Life in prison without possibility of parole is sufficient punishment for the kinds of crime committed by Ross and the two worthies tried for the Cheshire murders. Assume a scenario more likely than the possibility that someone in Connecticut will be convicted of a capital crime he did not commit -- namely, that a person serving a life sentence without parole manages to commit another capital crime while incarcerated. Under such circumstances, would a life sentence with out parole attached to yet another life sentence without parole be a just punishment?

Capital punishment violates religious proscriptions. This, at least, is a reasonable and perhaps unanswerable argument for the abolition of the death penalty. But in Connecticut we are much in the habit of winking at religious proscriptions, while getting on as best we can with our sinful, imperfect lives.

Courant Prepares To Endorse Malloy-Blumenthal

The 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 abolition legislation the paper approves.

The “horrific” Cheshire murder trials likely will but should not “have a definitive impact on whether death by lethal injection continues to be a punishment option in this state,” according to the editorial. “We hope that it does not — that lawmakers and the next governor can summon the courage to substitute life in prison without parole as the ultimate penalty for capital crimes.”

The paper notes that a bill abolishing the death penalty would not affect capital felony prisoners convicted before the bill had been passed. An ex post facto rule of law, according to which laws cannot be retroactively applied to people whose actions were legal before laws prohibiting them were passed, still is observed broadly in the United States by most lawyers and jurists willing to bind themselves with adamantine Constitutional strictures. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal appears to have flouted that rule, binding on all lesser mortals, in the Pricilla Dickman case.

The editorial notes, “In last Tuesday's gubernatorial debate, Democrat Dan Malloy said he would, if elected, sign a bill that repeals the death penalty, but only going forward. That is, repeal would not apply to death sentences that stem from legal proceedings already underway.”

Abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut is being driven forward entirely by moral considerations. The Catholic Church and other religious institutions, as well as a secular media that considers execution for capital crimes to be morally repugnant, are in the vanguard of the abolition movement. No one seriously pretends that in the modern period criminals executed in Connecticut have been unjustly punished. The claim that capital felony punishment had been unjustly visited upon Michael Ross, one of two offenders executed in the state in the last 50 years, was always absurd.

In states like Texas, of course, things are different. Capital punishment opponents who often employ the canard that an accused might be unjustly convicted in Connecticut generally point to cases outside the state. No one, least of all the Courant, mentions that in Texas the governor is permitted to commute a capital felony sentence to life in prison if files a timely petition to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles that is signed by the governor.

The Courant has not yet asked Malloy whether as governor he would seek a like authority from a Democratic dominated legislature that had sent him a death penalty abolition bill he has promised to sign.

It is morally deracinated to seek abolition of the death penalty on moral grounds without also seeking some way to avert capital punishment in cases in which it has been imposed. It is impossible to conceive of a moral opposition to, say, slavery that would emancipate no slave currently held in bondage under a, emancipation declaration. After the legislature has found a way to abolish the death penalty, it will find a way to emancipate those convicted of capital punishment under a discarded law, perhaps by giving the new Democratic governor an commutation option like one that may be invoked by the governor of Texas.

In the meantime, Hayes, awaiting his just punishment under a law that will be abolished by a Democratic legislature allied with a Democratic governor, is preparing for his penalty phase trial.

Having been convicted of murdering a mother and two daughters in a fashion that even the most conscience stricken editors and columnists at the Courant consider heinous and depraved, Hayes’ lawyer, borrowing an leaf from Attorney General Blumenthal’s playbook, is preparing to argue to the jury that convicted his client that the capital felony charge should be overthrown because it would be too expensive to carry the cumbersome capital felony process through to its just end.

In May, 1990, arguing against Bill H.B. 5542, which when passed made death penalty convictions less burdensome for prosecutors by requiring courts to issue a death penalty when aggravating factors outweighed mitigating factors, Blumenthal advised:

“The death penalty not only lacks any deterrent affect. It is also been proven to be more expensive to impose than any kind of prison term. It is more expensive to house and continue the convictions, maintain the convictions of those who have been convicted and sentenced to death. That is a fact that has been proven again, and again, throughout the country. And it is the reason along with all the others, that most countries in Western Europe do not have the death penalty. Most New England States do not have it. We are one of the few in the region that does.

“So I urge my fellow members in this Circle, for all those reasons, to reject this amendment. Once again, we have a measure, a proposed statute with surface appeal, seductive on its face. But in reality it will not accomplish the purposes that its proponents say it will.”

The Courant also believes that it is too expensive in Connecticut to execute Hayes and Komisarjevsy: “As we have for decades, The Courant continues to oppose the death penalty because it has been unworkable and is expensive, unfair, risky and morally compromising.”

Especially, morally compromising: “Finally, the death penalty puts the state in a morally compromised position. As horrible as some crimes are and as evil as many of the perpetrators may be, the state should not be in their same business, the business of death.”

One supposes it would compromise the morals of the Courant to endorse as governor a candidate who approves the death penalty. That would be Republican candidate Tom Folly. The flip-flopable Blumenthal, by reversing himself on the death penalty -- as a senatorial candidate, he now approves it – has introduced a new wrinkle into Courant editorial processing: How can the paper justify itself morally by supporting both Malloy and Blumenthal?

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And the Courant is adept at finding ways out of moral swamps.