Hartford Courant

Business or a Connecticu­t junket in Paris? And another bad conviction.

- By Chris Powell Chris Powell has written about Connecticu­t government and politics for many years. (Cpowell@cox.net)

With about 34,000 of its residents employed in the aerospace industry, Connecticu­t has good reason to be represente­d at the Paris Air Show this week, so Gov. Ned Lamont aims to be there with a delegation of state officials and business leaders.

“Our goal,” the governor said, “is to get more products that are made in Connecticu­t out into the world, and to get more of the world doing business in Connecticu­t.”

Some time may pass before Connecticu­t learns whether the excursion was a serious attempt at business developmen­t or just a junket.

Besides the concentrat­ion of aerospace businesses here, the state’s advantages to the industry are said to include its strategic location between New York and Boston, the great life in its suburbs, its skilled manufactur­ing workforce and the quality of its products.

Yet business leaders from around the world who come to the air show more for business than junketing may be prepared to inquire beyond the convention­al wisdom.

They might ask about the recent inability of Connecticu­t manufactur­ers to find qualified people and the growing share of the workforce emerging uneducated from the state’s schools and suited only for menial work.

They might ask about the state’s high taxes and particular­ly the recent extension of its 10% surcharge on the corporatio­n income tax.

They also might ask about the state’s high housing costs and severe shortage of housing for working people.

If a foreign company wanted to open a facility in Connecticu­t with 200 or more employees, exactly where could enough housing be found for them near the new company? Even if the new company were willing to build housing for its employees, would any municipali­ty welcome it or just obstruct it with zoning?

If they face such serious questions in Paris, Connecticu­t’s delegation well might prefer to linger at the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre or any croissant shop.

Wrongful conviction case: Connecticu­t has another catastroph­ic, and likely expensive, wrongful conviction case — that of Adam Carmon, who served 28 years in prison on a charge of firing a dozen bullets into an apartment in New Haven in 1994, killing a baby and paralyzing her grandmothe­r.

In November Superior Court Judge Jon Alander reversed Carmon’s conviction­s and ordered a new trial. Last week the

New Haven prosecutor’s office dropped the charges, having concluded that the evidence for them won’t stand up a second time — eyewitness identifica­tion that was shaky and ballistics evidence that has been repudiated. Additional­ly, the judge concluded that the prosecutio­n withheld from the defense evidence suggesting two purported drug dealers could have done the shooting and that the police failed to pursue other suspects, including a man who confessed and then recanted.

No motive for Carmon to commit the crime was ever offered.

So last week Judge Alander dismissed the case, telling Carmon, “The criminal justice system failed you.”

For the 28 years taken from him, Carmon is entitled to file a damage claim against the state and sue the agencies that investigat­ed and prosecuted him. He probably has at least $5 million coming to him, though few people would exchange 28 years for any amount.

The criminal justice system also seems to have failed a disturbing number of others in recent years, especially in the New Haven area. Critics point to a dozen other overturned conviction­s involving complaints of police and prosecutor misconduct from the 1980s through the early 2000s. They want a federal investigat­ion.

Investigat­ion is very much warranted, but not by the federal government now that the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigat­ion have been so corrupted politicall­y.

No, the investigat­ion here should be conducted by Connecticu­t’s own authoritie­s, and particular­ly by the General Assembly, which has broad authority over the operations of state government, including criminal justice, but seldom investigat­es or even audits anything, though the other day it asked state agencies to study the urgent matter of adding “non-binary” to the gender identifica­tion sections of their license and applicatio­n forms.

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