Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Ben Shapiro   has come and gone. UConn alumni – students who have grown up – will be pleased to hear that there were no untoward incidents during his appearance at their university. Shapiro’s bona fides are impressive. He is a conservative political commentator, columnist, radio talk show host, lawyer, editor in chief of The Daily Wire, which he founded, and the author of Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth, a book he began writing when he was 17 years old. And he is visibly Jewish, a point that will become increasingly relevant as this column progresses.

Lucian Wintrich is the intolerable conservative nuisance – and victim – who was arrested by UConn police and charged with breach of peace for having made an unsuccessful attempt to exercise his First Amendment rights at Connecticut’s flagship university. Wintrich had been invited to speak by the University of Connecticut Young Republican Club on campus.   A raucous crowd – seeded,  one commentator noted, with fascists   – prevented Wintrich from delivering his thoughts on “It’s OK To Be White.”

Here is a chicken or the egg question: In political corruption cases, should the targeting of suspects for prosecution precede or follow the investigation? Most of us would agree that the targeting of conspirators and co-conspirators in political corruption trials should follow an investigation, because it is the investigation itself that determines culpability. “First the verdict, then the trial,” says the Queen of Hearts in the topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll’s “ Through the Looking Glass .” The world confronted by Alice in Wonderland is supposed to be inverted, the way images are seen in a mirror. But in the real world, we want verdicts to follow trials and targeting in political corruption trials to follow complete and exhaustive investigations. At some point in the corruption investigation of John Rowland, prosecutors decided to target Mr. Rowland as conspirator number one. Other apparently less important conspirators in the case were Brian Foley, the owner of ...

Somewhere in his voluminous writings , criminal defense attorney Norm Pattis, a very “good” – quote marks intended – lawyer, makes the case for jury nullification. His argument runs along these lines: We trust jurors with our property, our lives and our sacred honor, why then should we not trust them to bring in a just verdict athwart the instructions of a judge or the presentation of highly edited evidence? In the modern (Kafkaesque?) trial, the defense and prosecution are permitted to argue during various sidebars and out of the hearing of a jury the fine points of law according to which this or that piece of evidence, germane or not, should or should not be presented to the jury. Why not allow all evidence, save fictional evidence, to go to the jury and allow lawyers to argue at trial whether or not the data is pertinent?

After maintaining a four month quarantine on information concerning the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter, Danbury State’s Attorney Stephen Sedensky dumped some arrest warrant information into Connecticut’s highly speculative media stream. The closely guarded information, released only days before Connecticut’s General Assembly   was poised to write bills restricting gun ownership, begs the question: Why now? When criticized by a few Connecticut reporters and commentators for having withheld information inadvertently released by state police Col. Danny Stebbins during a New Orleans Chiefs of Police conference, investigators suddenly and inexplicably abandoned their often iterated threadbare rational: that releasing information in the arrest warrants would compromise “an active investigation.” They let part of the cat, its nose only, out of the bag.

Taking his education reform show on the road, Governor Dannel Malloy on Thursday crashed into former Bridgeport Board of Education member Maria Pereira, one of the plaintiffs in a successful suit that overturned the dismantling of a Bridgeport Board of Education. "On Tuesday, the Supreme Court overturned your administration's illegal takeover of the Bridgeport Board of Education," Mrs. Pereira told Mr. Malloy in a packed room at the Village South Center for Community Life in Hartford, "and I want to know if your plans to reform our schools are all about disenfranchising parents in schools all over the state like you're attempting to do in Bridgeport?" Mr. Malloy attempted to deflect the question by asking Ms. Pereira, “How happy are you with the Bridgeport schools?" Ms. Pereira acknowledged that the school system could use improvement. “No, the Bridgeport Board of Education hasn’t done a good job in the last 20 years,” she responded. “It’s been co...

Taking Back The Courts What We Can Do To Reclaim Our Sovereignty By Norm Pattis Publisher: Sutton Hart Press Price: $22.95 Attorney Norm Pattis, the author of “Taking Back the Courts: What We Can Do to Reclaim Our Sovereignty,” is viewed by other lawyers as a cross examination impresario. If this particular talent is a gift, it is one that in Mr. Pattis’s case has been honed throughout his years practicing law as a criminal defense attorney in Connecticut. Mr. Pattis is used to thinking outside the box – very quickly. He is disputatious, capable of mastering a complex briar patch of facts and legal precedents in quick time and effortlessly applying the relevant points in his summations. And he has a pony tail. Pony tails, however, may be deceptive. They evoke the silly sixties, free love, pot and the slow evisceration of the antique morality of benighted backward looking parents of the Woodstock generation. But as Mr. Pattis’ ponytail swishes through the chapt...

Jury trials are scripted narrations carefully edited by all the parties involved – judge, defense council and prosecutor – not always to the benefit of the party accused. Priscilla Dickman, accused of four counts of forgery by the state attorney general’s office, was found guilty on March 24 on all counts and faces in mid-May a possible sentence of eight years in prison. The trial turned on disparities in medical forms – documents #8, #9 and #10 – that found their way into the personnel file of Ms. Dickman, for 27 years a senior microbiologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center (UCHC), the prosecution contending that Ms. Dickman had altered the forms to secure a benefit. Ms. Dickman was convicted of second degree forgery for having tampered with the documents and, upon sentencing, may receive 2 years on each of the four counts for a total of 8 years. In criminal trials, the prosecution is charged with presenting to the jury evidence sufficiently compelling to justify ...

The Whistleblower Trap Priscilla Dickman, all 5 foot 2 of her, has been wiggling on former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s torture rack for six agonizing years. The end in sight keeps disappearing over the horizon whenever her case comes to a decision point. Ms. Dickman, a union steward when she was in the employ of the UConn Heath Center (UCHC), all 110 pounds of her, is still fighting for what most of us would consider decent justice, but it eludes her whenever she stretches out her hand to grasp it. Not that she is dispirited, not at all. She has been conducting the civil side of her case pro se (by her self) and in the intervening six years has cast serious doubt on the proposition that a fool has himself for a lawyer. The criminal and civil side of her case is being handled by John Geida of Embry Neuser, while Norm Pattis is handling Ms. Dickman’s habeas charge of innocence. Early on in Ms. Dickman’s ordeal, she was represented for a number of years by union lawyers who ...

Martha Dean, the Republican nominee for attorney general, made a fruitless plea to Courant reporter Mathew Kauffman at the end of his front page story, “Martha Dean Embroiled In Custody Battle: Experts In The Case Say It Has Taken A Toll On Martha Dean's Son,” a heartfelt cry into the belly of the beast: "’You're straying into territory that involves a 12-year-old boy and somebody who has lied profusely,’ she said, repeating a frequent assertion she has made in court about her ex-husband. ‘This is serious stuff. Do not go there. This is not appropriate for journalism. It has nothing to do with running for attorney general. It's just the luck that I got stuck with, in having married somebody like this, and we're trying to do the best we can to get through this.’" But go there Kauffman did. At the center of Kauffman’s story is a psychological evaluation of Dean plucked from Superior Court documents that trace a messy divorce. Messy divorces, almost always ...

Norman Pattis, a defense attorney in New Haven has weighed in on Governor Jodi Rell and the Michael Ross case. What is it about the death penalty, other than its finality, that makes anti-death penalty proponents vacate their craniums when they begin to think about it? “Michael Ross was sentenced to death almost two decades ago,” Pattis wrote in a recent op-ed column , “and his case has bounced through the court system for more than a decade.” He almost got it right. The case has been dribbled through the court system by public defenders who, for twenty years after Ross had been prosecuted and found guilty of murdering four women, strung out the litigation through appeals over the objections of their client. Ross, who murdered eight women, has said that he wants justice to be done, so that the suffering of the families of his victims may be finally resolved. This may be Ross’ finest hour in a life full of murderous deeds. Ross, Pattis continues, “has declared a desire to end the fi...