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.

What Didn’t They Know And Why Didn’t They Know It?

There has been a journalistic breakthrough in the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass murder case.

It’s always a hopeful sign when journalists rub the sleepy seeds from their eyes and wake up.

Some in Connecticut appear to have been aroused by a story that first appeared in the New York Daily News – significantly NOT in any Connecticut media watering hole. A few days ago, Rick Green of the Hartford Courant speculated on his blog, “Maybe the state police owe us some official details about what happened — before we change laws and spend a lot of the public’s money.” In the future, after all the legislation affecting legal gun ownership has been rolled out, signed, sealed and delivered, the question foremost in everyone’s mind will be, “What didn’t they know and why didn’t’ they know it.”

“Everyone” would include the news community; the two governmental panels assigned, one by the governor and another by the General Assembly, to bring home the data on the basis of which legislators might produce a bill preventing future mass murders of mothers, school children and teachers; the many politicians, both in Connecticut and elsewhere, who have steadfastly insisted that Sandy Hook should be the impetus for legislation that will keep us safe from mass murderers; and most especially the families of the victims in Sandy Hook who, all along, have been hoping the General Assembly and governor might produce preventative legislation.

The journalistic breakthrough occurred in a story filed by Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News.

“What investigators found,” Mr. Lupica wrote, “was a chilling spreadsheet 7 feet long and 4 feet wide that required a special printer, a document that contained Lanza’s obsessive, extensive research — in nine-point font — about mass murders of the past, and even attempted murders.

“’We were told (Lanza) had around 500 people on this sheet,’ a law enforcement veteran told me Saturday night. ‘Names and the number of people killed and the weapons that were used, even the precise make and model of the weapons. It had to have taken years. It sounded like a doctoral thesis; that was the quality of the research.’”

Partial information about the “active murder investigation,” the often repeated formulation of Lieutenant Paul Vance of the Connecticut state police, leaked out of a conference in New Orleans, where people in the know, mostly police investigators, were sharing information with other people in the know. Up to this point, great pains had been taken to assure that authorized data remained bottled up. Most journalists live in the hope that the truth will out –eventually. The truth usually follows in the train of everything else; it’s often the last actor on the stage before the curtain is rung down.

Adam Lanza, it appeared from the New Orleans conference, was a studious killer well versed in the methods of other mass murderers. His beau ideal of the perfect mass murderer was Norway’s Anders Breivik. Connecticut Commentary first mentioned Mr. Breivik in a blog and column titled “Sandy HookShould Teach Us How To Think” way back in December.

Mr. Lanza apparently was trying to beat Mr. Breivik’s record of 77 dead. Owing to the arrival of first responders armed with substantial firepower, Mr. Lanza fell short of the mark he had set for himself, having committed suicide after murdering 27 people, including his mother. Newtown has since set aside enough money to provide all its schools with armed personnel.

The data that leaked out of the New Orleans conference is important. Diagnosis and data are always important for, say, doctors addressing a disease or legislators writing laws. A law is a prophylactic, a legal preventative. There are no fewer than three commissions charged with sifting through the Sandy Hook data so that legislators might write reasonable laws to prevent future Sandy Hooks. BUT THERE IS LITTLE AUTHORITAIVE DATA that any responsible legislator might consult in writing such a law.

And why not? Well, Mr. Vance will tell you that the “criminal investigation is ongoing.” It may be completed in June, long after all the insufficient prophylactic laws have been written. Will those legal remedies, based on partial or doubtful data be effective in achieving deterrence?

Mr. Breivik was not deterred by Norway’s capital punishment law because Norway has no such law. Connecticut abolished its capital punishment law shortly after a mass murder in Cheshire committed by newly released prisoners, only months before Mr. Lanza took up arms against his mother, 20 school children and 6 teachers.

The General Assembly is proposing to add to a long list of proscribe weapons yet another weapon, the AR-15, produced here in Connecticut and the most often purchased sporting rifle in the United States. Will that do the job? Grave doubts have been raised, not only by members of the NRA, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy’s bete noir of the moment. Most recently, U.S. Senate leader Harry Reid has doomed a federal ban on assault weapons, possibly over the hearty objections of Mr. Murphy and other Democrats in Connecticut who think that state laws prohibiting weapons are insufficient to stop importation from other states.

At the time he shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mr. Lanza was armed with two semi-automatic pistols – the weapon of choice in most cities, including Chicago, murder capital of the United States and the political nursery bed of President Barack Obama – and a shotgun (left in the car – WE THINK – “ongoing investigation,”don’t you know) that would have been as devastating as the Bushmaster rifle he used.

If Mr. Lanza had survived, Connecticut would not have been able to execute him, because there is no capital punishment law in Connecticut prescribing execution for mass murderers or terrorists. Should there be such a law? Tried on terrorist charges in Norway, Mr. Breivik was declared sane by a panel of five judges and sentenced to 21 years in prison, a sentence that can be repeatedly extended by 5 years so long as he is considered a threat to society.

The two repeat offenders who murdered a family in Cheshire could have received early release credits under a program initiated by Mike Lawlor, Governor Dannel Malloy’s Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning. Indeed under Mr. Lawlor’s early release Risk Reduction Credit Program, two separate prisoners given early release credits already have committed murders in Meriden and Manchester.

The unavailability of authorized hard data on Mr. Lanza’s multiple murder spree should alarm legislators who are poised to add to a growing list of banned weapons yet one more weapon in an effort to deter such crimes as have been committed by Mr. Lanza and Mr. Breivik. Are such legal placeboes palliatives rather than real solutions to real problems?

 

Everyone in Connecticut – those who fear for the safety of children, legislators, the families of the victims, the tribunes of the people -- should be insisting that the criminal report be released right now. Tomorrow will be too late.

The Perpetual Progressive Campaign

So, the elections are over -- for a too brief interlude.

The grumps who have been complaining all along that there is no longer a breathing space between elections are right. Forward! as they say in the progressive Beltway. In our time, politics itself has become a form of electioneering. That’s what is wrong with it. President John Kennedy governed; President Barack Obama campaigns.

Campaign finance reform was supposed to settle some of these problems.

Karl Kraus, a great German critic and a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, use to say that psychoanalysis WAS the disease it purported to cure; so with campaign finance reform and other political bromides. There are only two ways to shorten the political season. The first is borrowed from Shakespeare, with an important revision: “First thing we do is shoot all the lawyers,” Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher said. A modern Butcher might be inclined to say the same of politicians, a good number of whom are lawyers. The second less dramatic solution is to term-limit politicians. While this more practical measure may not eliminate political corruption –neither does campaign finance reform, by the way – it will distribute political corruption more fairly among yet uncorrupted new political recruits and weaken the stranglehold incumbents have on political office.

One reporter wrote in a story about Mitt Romney’s failed campaign that the campaign for governor of Connecticut begins the day after Romney’s concession speech. And so it has. Governor Dannel Malloy has claimed that Obama’s victory in some sense vindicates his own political program.

That is a weak argument. In Connecticut, there was little to no turn-over in the General Assembly following the election, although Republicans in the state made some of Malloy’s questionable initiatives the center piece of their own campaigns. Actually, Republicans have been too cautious in their criticisms, and programs are vindicated, ultimately, by their consequences.

Mike Lawlor’s early release program, for instance, is a ticking time bomb. Once a prosecutor for the State's Attorney Office in New Haven and later co-chairman of the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 2011, Lawlor is Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy and the chief architect of Connecticut’s early release Earned Risk Reduction Credits program.

It’s only a matter of days, weeks and months before another violent criminal let loose early under Lawlor’s ill-conceived program murders another store clerk: So far, that has happened twice since the program was launched, ineptly and without proper political vetting. Republicans are right to insist that early release should apply only to non-violent criminals. But Malloyalists operating under a one party regime tend to be hard-headed about their palliatives. Like most politicians, they are effectively reproved only after the plane has crashed into the mountain.

Some parallels may legitimately be drawn between Malloy and Obama.

Both are chief executives; both are progressive Democrats. During the early part of Obama’s first term, Democrats controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress. Malloy, the first Democrat elected governor in more than twenty years, presides over a General Assembly controlled by Democrats. Obama has yet to produce a budget, and this has alarmed some people who believe that state and national budgets define both political programs and the nation’s destiny. Malloy stiffed Republicans during his first budget negotiations, as did Obama, and hammered out a budget in collusion with SEBAC, the union organization charged with negotiating contract terms with the governor and Connecticut’s ex officio third party. Malloy, the Malloyalists, the Democratic dominated General Assembly and union representatives pushed through a “fair share” budget that relied – unfairly, say its critics – on the largest tax increase in state history, following close on the heels of the second largest tax increase in state history, the Lowell Weicker income tax. Obama is promising a “fair share” budget as well. So far, he has not been able to pass any budget. Both in Connecticut and in the nation, recent elections have not substantially changed political configurations. These are the obvious parallels.

There are important differences as well.

Here and there, one glimpses hints, foggy intimations, that Malloy is not willing to surrender the WHOLE of Connecticut’s government to progressive sans culottes who favor the despoliation of the rich, the one percent of those in the state who believe in a kind of egalitarianism that differs only in degree from that of Sylvain Marechal, the utopian socialist who declared in his Manifeste des Égaux (Manifesto of Equals, 1801) "Let the arts perish if needs be. But let us have real equality!" Antoine Lavoisier, the "father of modern chemistry," was executed during the French Revolution in 1794. The revolutionary judge who sentenced Lavoisier to death proclaimed, "The Republic has no need of chemists." Such was the purity of egalitarianism, a modern construct, at its headwaters.

Here in Connecticut, we yet tremble before such perfection. Hope and change beckons.

Lawlor’s Law

 

The whole point and purpose of the Office of Victim Advocate (OVA) is, as the title suggests, victim advocacy. Any defense lawyer or reporter will tell you that advocacy hurts and involves incalculable risks to the advocate. Such is the case with the OVA, which can most accurately be described as an independent in-house whistleblower operation.

A number of people who showed up on a blustery afternoon outside the Wethersfield Department of Corrections (DOC) on October 16 to protest the immanent firing of Michelle Cruz, Connecticut’s Victim’s Advocate, had use of her services. One of them was Elizabeth Barrett, whose daughter was murdered four years ago. She was accompanied by her husband who, with his close cropped white beard, looked for all the world like Ernest Hemingway.

Mrs. Barrett stepped to the battery of microphones, leaned into them and said in a crisp voice, “Four and a half years ago, we were fortunate enough to meet Michelle Cruz, Connecticut’s Victim’s Advocate. She has sat with us at our meetings with police, advised us of our rights, explained the judicial system, and explained legal terms in a language we could understand. Her empathy and knowledge have been indispensable, which brings me to the reason I’m here today.”