‘The ultimate test’
Westport officials reflect on year of COVID
WESTPORT — First Selectman Jim Marpe still remembers standing on the steps outside of town hall a year ago — maskless and surrounded by other officials — announcing schools and various aspects of town government would have to close.
COVID-19 had come to Westport.
“This was going to be the ultimate test,” Marpe said.
Days later, the town would be thrust into the national spotlight as news spread that someone from South Africa attended a party in Westport while contagious. He tested positive when he returned home, a result others at the party would soon have as well. Contact tracing became a complicated and
daunting task since partygoers had since scattered to their homes.
The numbers quickly climbed, and by March 16, 2020, Westport’s 20 cases would account for nearly half of the state’s total.
But as the national story looked at people partying in Westport, Marpe said a different story of compassion and creativity was emerging among residents to minimize COVID’s spread.
“When Westport realized it was as vulnerable as anywhere else, they acted smartly and compassionately to come together to fight this,” Marpe said.
He said most realized this wasn’t of anyone’s making, and no one understood how it was transmitted then.
The cases weren’t just appearing in Westport. Gov. Ned Lamont closed schools and other places that could contribute to the spread of COVID, rolling out the first of many restrictions.
Now, a year later, more than 526,000 people have died in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Connecticut reports more than 7,750 deaths due to COVID, with 29 of them in Westport.
Green Farms Church will hold a special ceremony on Saturday at Veterans Green to honor those who died.
Westport’s first death came on April 2.
“That’s when it hit in a different way,” Marpe said, adding he knew it would eventually happen in Westport but he couldn’t help wondering if there was something he could have done to prevent it. “I remember that as being a very sobering moment.”
He said, as public officials, everything they do has to be geared towards protecting life and making people’s lives better.
“I’m fortunate to have a staff that has that frame of mindset,” he said.
Peparing for it
Town officials had been preparing for the coronavirus for months before it actually appeared in Westport. The emergency management team began meeting regularly in January to plan for what would happen, protocols for first responders and what would trigger the different mitigations.
Both the human services and health directors played vital roles in that, Marpe said.
They even held a COVID seminar on March 8, which about 200 people attended and more watched remotely.
Masks were still not required, and officials believed distance played a role in the spread, Marpe said.
“I think back to that time and go ‘Wow, what were they thinking?’” he said of the CDC’s guidance. “It seems so obvious now.”
Westport officials already had some experience with a pandemic. A resident had possibly been exposed to Ebola while on a trip to Africa a few years ago. Nothing had come of it, but it gave him and his staff some practice. Even with that, COVID raised a lot of questions.
“What do we do now and how can we make sure the functions of government continue — can we continue?” Marpe said.
The emergency team usually meets to handle winter or tropical storms; the storm comes and then they coordinate the effort to dig out, a process that is over in a matter of days.
“This one is with us every day, and the rules change every day,” he said.
The team still meets though it’s now weekly instead of daily.
Adapting
Marpe said their planning and the technology investments allowed employees to work from home as they switched to a cohort model and restricted the public town hall. They figured out how to hold town meetings remotely and still get public comment. By early April, even all 36 members of the Representative Town Meeting were able to meet online.
“I look back and that was an activity that gave me real optimism,” Marpe said.
They also set up a tent outside so the town clerk could continue meeting with residents.
Marpe said one of the scariest days came the weekend of March 14 when crowds packed Compo Beach, prompting him to close the beach parking lots and playgrounds.
“We were just looking at each other saying, ‘How can we control this?’” he said.
Sara Harris, Westport’s operations director, said it’s hard to say what they would do differently because the decisions made then were based on the available guidance.
“We all did our best with the information we had at the time,” she said.
Businesses, restaurants, organizations and residents got creative and adapted too.
Places of worship went online or outside. Restaurants adapted to carry-out and then outdoor dining. Other businesses changed their offerings to meet a need.
Remarkable Theater started a drive-in movie in a parking lot and began partnering with other nonprofits to help those in need.
Residents and businesses rallied around each other helping those infected with COVID or struggling in other ways.
“A lot of generosity was displayed,” Marpe said.
One thing that has helped the economy is that many Westport residents have managerial roles or jobs in finance and other professions that allowed them to work from home, he said
“People were still employed,” Marpe said. “They just weren’t getting on the train every morning.”
Looking forward
While much is still unknown — like if there will be a Memorial Day parade or Fourth of July fireworks — things are already starting to look brighter.
The schools have held two vaccination clinics for educators in Westport, Weston and Easton. As of Monday, the state reported about half of people age 55 and older had received vaccines. Some of the town’s spring and summer recreation events will be offered again after being put on hold last year. Marpe has also seen an uptick and traffic.
“Something is coming back,” he said. “... I don’t know if there will be normal. I think normal will look different.”
He suspects more people will take advantage of working from home and maybe only go in a couple of times a week instead of five.
Marpe has seen more families out going for walks or jogs together during the pandemic, something he hopes continues.
And as the state reopens, Marpe is looking to the next task.
“The next challenge is how do we get back into public meeting mode?” he said.
In March 2012, six state senators and Gov. Dannel 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, DColumbia, 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 re-sentenced 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 36page 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, DBridgeport and committee co-chair.
“With Northern closing, now is the time to have that conversation,” he said.
Just another inmate
In a deposition for Reynolds’ lawsuit filed with the court in November 2018, former Department of Correction Commissioner Leo Arnone — who also was on the 2012 tour at Northern and MacDougall — said he didn’t believe the 18-10b statute made the prison system more secure.
“This is punishment, that’s why it was built that way,” he said of 18-10b. “This is the way it was designed, to be a punishment for these specific crimes.”
Semple said he anticipated the statute would be found unconstitutional. When he spoke with officials from other states that had abolished the death penalty, they told him they relied on risk assessment formulas and reclassified men formerly on death row accordingly.
“Find me another state that has these types of requirements,” Semple said of 18-10b. “It doesn’t exist.” Lawlor agrees.
“The real goal was to get rid of the death penalty, and this was the price to pay to get that to happen, in my opinion: putting this language in, knowing full well it may not be enforceable,” Lawlor said.
Most of the men formerly on death row likely would be placed under “maximum security type of oversight,” Semple said, but the DOC lacks the discretion to reclassify the men to a different type of confinement.
In his 2018 deposition, Arnone recounted what happened the last time the state abolished the death penalty. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Furman v. Georgia that placed a moratorium on the death penalty until, four years later, the court ruled capital punishment was constitutional, allowing executions to resume.
Prison officials took the men on death row and “released them to the general population, maximum security only,” he said.
The landscape changes
In 2009 — two years after the Cheshire murders — it wasn’t as difficult to sell lawmakers on abolishing the death penalty. There was momentum nationally and within Connecticut for repeal. New Mexico had abolished capital punishment, and legislators in Colorado, Montana and Maryland came close to getting rid of it, as well.
Legislators passed a number of criminal justice reform measures in 2008 — changing the rules governing how the Board of Pardons and Paroles functions, mandating the DOC and parole board use a risk assessment tool so they could identify who is high-risk to release, and allowing prosecutors, parole boards and other members of the criminal justice system to share information on cases.
Lawlor said there were several arguments in 2009 for repealing the death penalty, but he remembers the most compelling being that capital punishment in Connecticut was “a fraud.” Michael Ross was the first person executed since the 1960s, and he spent the last 10 years of his life working with prosecutors so he could get the death penalty, Lawlor said.
“It wasn’t just all of a sudden people became liberals. It was, ‘It doesn’t work, it can’t work, and there’s no way you can fix it,'” said Lawlor.
Over Petit’s objection, legislators passed the bill and sent it to Rell’s desk. She vetoed it.
The conditions of confinement language was not in the 2009 bill. “Those only were formulated after that visit to the prisons [in March 2012,] where a number of those legislators said, ‘I will only vote to repeal the death penalty if you add some language that makes it clear they won’t ever be in general population,'” Lawlor said.
Malloy took office in January 2011. During his campaign, Malloy said he would sign a bill repealing the death penalty but as time passed, and the political landscaped morphed, repeal was no longer a sure bet by 2012.
“There’s a magic to that kind of thing. But when you do that thing, strangely the magic wears off,” Winfield said. “And people are now faced with the fact that they’ve taken a certain vote
and people are reacting to that vote and all of the things that come with it… the landscape changed, even though the people didn’t really change.”
The Cheshire murders began to take up more and more space in the state’s subconscious. As their trials played out in 2010 and 2011, Hayes and Komisarjevsky seemed to be constantly in the news. While the horrific crime tapped into the primal fears of upper-middle class families who thought they were insulated from random acts of violence, the trials renewed both those fears and public sympathy for Petit.
Hayes was sentenced to death in November 2010. Prosecutors portrayed him as a sadistic, violent man who abused his brother when they were younger, and who threatened suicide as a way to manipulate jurors to spare him from execution.
Jurors spent four days weighing the evidence before determining a death sentence was an appropriate punishment for Komisarjevsky. Superior Court Judge Jon Blue sentenced him to death in 2012, three months before legislators would pass the bill to repeal the death penalty for future crimes.
Petit later ran for office as a Republican. He won a seat representing Plainville in the House of Representatives in the 2016 election, a position he still holds today.
He declined to be interviewed for this story.
Life in special circumstances
Reynolds was transferred from jail to Northern in 1995 shortly after the supermax opened.
“I have been locked in a concrete cell alone every day for the past 23 years,” Reynolds said in an affidavit in 2018. “I can only communicate with my neighbors by shouting through the vent, and even shouting can be hard to hear over the constant noise in the unit.”
Despite his status as a “special circumstances” inmate, Reynolds’ conditions of incarceration are not unique among prisoners who are held on other restrictive statuses. The DOC will move some of these prisoners to different cells every few months, search inmates’ cells at least twice per week and lock people up in solitary for long periods until they complete special programming.
In his 2019 ruling on Reynolds’ case, Underhill said the conditions of confinement for the former death row inmates are unconstitutional because, among other reasons, the legislature retroactively punished these men for their crimes after they had already been sentenced. He issued an order requiring prison officials to give Reynolds more time out of his cell and prohibiting prison officials from segregating him from other prisoners not on the special status.
Underhill also prohibited the state from enforcing 18-10b against any inmate being held in a Connecticut prison.
“From the moment the repeal was passed, I felt like it was inexorably leading to this showdown. You can’t simultaneously save someone’s life and then subject them to this kind of torture
for the rest of their life,” Metcalf said. “Think about what that’s like as they start to age and one-by one they die off. It’s like a nursing home from hell.”
Lawmakers’ options
If the state waits until Reynolds’ case finishes wending through the courts to make any changes to the ways inmates on special circumstances are confined, lawmakers can act now. Stafstrom, co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, noted that the committee has raised the PROTECT Act, which, would largely end solitary confinement for all people in prisons and jails.
“Where I stand is, someone’s risk level should not be based on the crime they committed in society but how they comport themselves within the correctional facility,” said Stafstrom, who was not in the legislature 2012 when his colleagues voted to abolish the death penalty.
Winfield, now a state senator representing New Haven and a co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, said he thinks the legislature has little impetus to take up the issue, since the DOC isn’t asking for a statutory change, and lawmakers haven’t been asked to grapple with the constitutionality of the special circumstances conditions of confinement.
“I think oftentimes the reason why the court must act is because the legislature is immobilized,” Winfield said. “Whether we think there’s a value to the legislature acting or not, this is one of those situations where ultimately the courts need to act.”
Some survivors of crime feel differently. Jessica Pizzano, the director of victim services for Survivors of Homicide, Inc., which provides counseling, support and advocacy for homicide victims’ loves ones, said many of the people her organization has supported feel that if someone took another’s life and was sentenced to death, they should be treated differently than other people in prison. Pizzano said those families serve a “life sentence,” too, because of the trauma inflicted upon them.
“It helps them to know that, you know, they’re not in these big beautiful places, that they’re in a cold, dark cell,” Pizzano said. “You know, our families aren’t necessarily out for blood. But after something that’s happened to them, that’s so horrible, they like to know that the person’s life is not comfortable, and that the punishment is making them realize what they did was a horrible thing.”
Even though Hayes and Komisarjevsky are the reason lawmakers created the special circumstances law, they are not subjected to it. Both men were transferred to prisons in Pennsylvania nearly five years ago. As of March 1, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Correction’s Inmate Locator tool, Komisarjevsky is in a maximum security facility; Hayes is in a medium-security prison.
Because they are no longer in Connecticut, neither is being held under the conditions of confinement that Reynolds and the others must endure.