The GOP’s lust for the death penalty

So we’re really re-arguing the death penalty? That’s what the Republicans’ nearly unified position against Supreme Court Justice Andrew McDonald is about? The 2018 elections are going to be a referendum on capital punishment?

Right. And I would like to sell you some artifacts from another ship that already sailed — and sank — nearly 106 years ago: the R.M.S. Titanic.

Yes, there is a level of homophobia in the General Assembly over McDonald’s sexual orientation. Hatred of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy? Darn tootin’.

Connecticut Republicans, so tantalizingly close to the brink of gaining control of the House and Senate, maybe even the Governor’s Residence, are essentially using a lost argument to cover up their importation of Washington-style partisan GOP tactics to Connecticut.

You know what we haven’t had to deal with during the three years since the Connecticut Supreme Court essentially spared 11 Death Row inmates from lethal injections, while condemning them to darkness in forgotten cells until they stop breathing?

Think about it for a minute.

We haven’t seen Russell Peeler’s murderous eyes in photographs taken during a latest courtroom appearance for ordering the murder of a Bridgeport mother and her young son in 1999. He won’t be getting day passes for yet another appeals session before a judge in a packed courtroom. He is locked away and the next time we hear about him, it will be a day or two after he dies in prison.

Remember the courtroom circus that surrounded the horrendous Cheshire triple murderers in 2010? Every time the thugs Joshua Komisarjevsky and Stephen Hayes were taken to court, it required a convoy of security vehicles to drive them from the prison to the courthouses. They were the twisted, evil stars in the courtroom. Now, they’re out of sight. In tiny rooms.

For years, paying for their crimes, until they breathe their anonymous last.

Even before the

2012 bill, signed by Malloy, ended the death penalty for crimes going forward, there was no capital punishment in Connecticut. Instead, it was decades of mandatory appeals for Death Row inmates, for another trip to the courthouse for families to relive the horror, to rehash the bloody facts, to face the intrusion of press and TV cameras. There was no end in sight. At worse, somewhere, way off in the future, was the possibility of a syringe full of poison. Why people thought that the state’s most-violent criminals should be put to sleep like faithful old family pets — after millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded appeals — is beyond me. It also made sense for McDonald, on the high court in 2015, to join the majority in admitting that if capital punishment ends for some, it should end for all.

But listening to one after another lawmaker in the House of Representatives last week during the debate on McDonald’s nomination for chief justice, it seems like the GOP thinks they should run their 2018 election campaigns on bringing back the death penalty. I don’t think that plays in Connecticut. I think at this point we’ve joined the civilized part of the world that realizes that capital punishment makes the state no worse than the criminals themselves.

McDonald’s nomination is hanging fire in this partisan moment and if Senate Republican Leader Len Fasano of North Haven wants to go nuclear, he’ll hold his 18 members in rejecting McDonald. It sounds easier than it might be, it being an election year. There’s growing public interest. The state’s leading law school deans and law firms are warning of legislative meddling with the independence of courts. And one Democrat, Sen. Gayle Slossberg of Milford, has announced she won’t be voting.

“A lot of what it is is petty politics,” said Scott McLean,

McDonald’s nomination is hanging fire in this partisan moment and if Senate Republican Leader Len Fasano of North Haven wants to go nuclear, he’ll hold his 18 members in rejecting McDonald.

a political science professor at Quinnipiac University. “Some want to stick it to Malloy. But it would seem to me that we’re seeing the politics of Washington, D.C., filter down to the state level.” He said the attempt to end McDonald’s candidacy in Malloy’s final year is right out of the GOP tactics used at the end of the Obama administration.

“All of that stuff is a way for Republicans to sort of normalize the idea that the legislature should be scrutinizing every decision made on the Supreme Court,” McLean said. “The national partisan polarization has infected the process here, and we wouldn’t see this if the parties weren’t as evenly divided.”

So if McDonald’s nomination fails in the state Senate, does he save the state Democratic Party?