Connecticut’s sole supermax prison to close
In March 2012, six state senators and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s criminal justice point person, Michael Lawlor, visited two prisons: Northern Correctional Institution, a “supermax” prison where the men on death row were incarcerated, and MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, the largest maximum security prison in New England.
The goal: to convince lawmakers on the fence — all Democrats — to vote to repeal the death penalty.
The legislature had already sent a bill to end capital punishment to the governor’s desk in 2009, but it was vetoed by then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell. Fast forward three years, however, and the math had changed. Several lawmakers were reconsidering their earlier votes, hesitant to go against the wishes of Dr. William Petit, whose wife and two daughters were murdered at their Cheshire home in 2007.
“At every point of every conversation on criminal justice after July 2007, the Cheshire murders were the focal point,” Lawlor said in a recent interview. Now an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven, Lawlor also served 12 terms in the General Assembly.
Northern lived up to its reputation during that March tour. Lawmakers saw prisoners locked up 22 hours a day in tiny cement rooms, under guard when they moved outside their cells.
“The totality of the living conditions there, the grimness of the living conditions there, the totality of the grimness of the living conditions, had a profound effect,” former Senate President Pro Tem Donald E. Williams Jr., told the CT Mirror in 2012.
Then the group went to MacDougall. Natural light poured in through the windows in the facility’s atrium. Because the senators arrived midday, many prisoners were out of their cells.
To get senators to a yes on repeal, a compromise would need to be struck: those originally sentenced to die must remain in conditions more akin to Northern than MacDougall.
One of those Democrats was Sen. Edith Prague, D-Columbia, who was in favor of abolishing the death penalty until she met with Petit, who told her a repeal would make it more difficult for prosecutors to get a death sentence for Joshua Komisarjevsky, one of the two men who killed his wife and daughters. “I want to give [Petit] a little ounce of consideration here and that’s my reason at this point in time to not support repeal,” Prague told The Hartford Courant in 2011. “I have to live with myself. I could not for one second cause this family any more stress.”
The trip to Northern, however, assuaged Prague’s doubts.
“I did go to Northern and saw death row and saw how horrible it is there. … Spending life in prison without the possibility of parole on death row, in a situation that is just like death row, is very, very, very, severe punishment,” Prague told her colleagues in a Senate floor debate on April 4, 2012, recalling the visit to the Somers prison the previous month. “So — and that was our Amendment ‘A.'”
That amendment would become 18-10b, a statute that requires the Department of Correction to impose severe conditions of confinement on the former death row inmates. The bill created “special circumstances” that would ensure the men would not live comfortable lives in prison, even if they were spared lethal injection.
The Cheshire murders “factored into every second of the death penalty abolition,” said Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, who was serving in the House of Representatives during the
2012 vote to repeal the death penalty. Lawmakers didn’t want death row inmates — particularly the Cheshire murderers, Komisarjevsky and his accomplice Steven Hayes — “to be able to just roam free in the prisons,” he said. “They wanted them to have restrictive ways of living and all the things that made people feel better about casting a vote in the affirmative.”
It worked. Proponents of ending the death penalty in Connecticut succeeded in
2012, but not until they struck a deal that ensured those on death row would be held in conditions more onerous than the general incarcerated population. Not only did they codify many of the special conditions of confinement for death row inmates, the bill they passed was prospective, meaning capital punishment would not be sought as punishment for future crimes. But lethal injection would remain a distant possibility for the 11 men on death row at the time, until the state Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 2015.
“I’ve always thought they were the sacrifice so we could all feel better,” said Hope Metcalf, researcher and clinical lecturer at Yale Law School and Executive Director of the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights, of the fewer than a dozen men who remained on death row when capital punishment was repealed. “Because now Connecticut no longer has the death penalty.”
Malloy signed the bill April 25, 2012, enshrining 18-10b into statute.
“I don’t think you would have repealed the death penalty if you didn’t make that compromise,” said Winfield.
All seven of the men formerly on death row who are still locked up in Connecticut on special circumstances are at Northern. Joseph Silva, convicted of murder with special circumstances in 2018, is also subjected to those conditions of confinement. Like the others, he remains at the Somers prison.
Last month, DOC Commissioner Angel Quiros announced Northern will close by July 1. He cited the declining number of people in prisons and jails — a decline hastened since the pandemic’s onset — and his “obligation to the taxpayers of Connecticut” as the basis of his decision to shutter the supermax. The closure is symbolic to advocates who see the facility as a monument to a past ethos that the purpose of incarceration is to punish and “break people.”
Now, with Northern’s closure looming, prison officials must decide where to incarcerate the men who had been sentenced to die. Lawmakers, meanwhile, have an opportunity to change the conditions in which they live.
If Richard Reynolds gets his way, they might not have much of a choice.
‘Sentenced to death only’
For the past quarter of a century, Reynolds has been confined alone to a room the size of a parking space, a 12-by-7-foot cell in which he can walk from one end to
the other in two and a half steps.
Reynolds was sentenced to death in March 1995 for killing a Waterbury police officer. His sentence was changed to 999 years after the state Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that it was unconstitutional to execute the 11 men who were on death row. Over the next few years Reynolds and most of his peers were resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release. They would still die in prison — but by the passing of time, not by lethal injection.
In an affidavit, Reynolds said that two weeks after the 2015 Supreme Court ruling, prison officials removed the death row signs from the cell doors of those who had previously been sentenced to die. “Nothing else changed,” he said.
Like the other men held under special circumstances, Reynolds has been locked in his cell for up to 22 hours a day since he was sentenced. He is escorted or monitored if he leaves his cell, which is searched twice a week, and he is transferred to a new cell at least every 90 days. It’s been a quarter of a century since he interacted with any incarcerated people other than those originally sentenced to death.
Reynolds filed a lawsuit challenging the conditions of his confinement in 2013, four years before he was resentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
“Plaintiff was sentenced to death only,” Reynolds scrawled in his original 36-page handwritten complaint. “Not a sentence of death and psycological (sic) torment and solitary confinement.” U.S. District Court Judge Stefan Underhill, who heard Reynolds’ complaint after he was resentenced and subject to life on special circumstances status, ruled in August 2019 that the conditions of confinement were unconstitutional. In his 57-page ruling, Underhill observed that the way Reynolds is locked up is “more restrictive than any other form of incarceration available within the State of Connecticut prison system.”
Now 52, Reynolds likely still has decades of life left in prison.
The state has appealed Underhill’s ruling, leaving Reynolds’ case unresolved.
The closure of Northern later this year, however, puts the state at a crossroads, with at least two possible paths forward.
State officials can keep to the status quo and simply hold the former death row cohort at another prison under the same conditions while they wait for a higher court judge to issue a final decision in Reynolds’ case on whether 18-10b is constitutional. Or, lawmakers can act proactively and pass a law striking 18-10b and change the conditions of confinement for the former death row inmates.
For its part, the DOC said it has not asked lawmakers to make a statutory change. The men will be sent to a similarly secure prison — either MacDougall, Cheshire, Garner or Corrigan — following Northern’s closure.
“We’ll be looking for a location that’s operationally feasible for our staff to manage them,” said Karen Martucci, the agency’s director of external affairs. “We will just manage them as they’re managed now, at a different location.”
The Judiciary Committee has raised a bill in this session that would largely end the practice of solitary confinement. That measure’s public hearing could be an opportunity for lawmakers and others to reconsider the special circumstances conditions of confinement, said Rep. Steven Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport and committee co-chair.
“With Northern closing, now is the time to have that conversation,” he said.