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Dick Blumenthal and the Death Penalty

If voters are curious about what Dick Blumenthal would be like as a United States senator, they should first be aware of his record as a state legislator. He served from 1984 to 1990, first in the house and then the senate of the Connecticut General Assembly.

On the death penalty, voters will find that his record as a lawmaker doesn't square with his rhetoric on the campaign trail. Whereas candidate Blumenthal claims to support the death penalty for sadistic murderer Steven Hayes -- who was convicted last week in the Cheshire home-invasion rape and murder of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters Hayley and Michaela -- legislator Blumenthal played a substantial role in thwarting the creation of a workable death-penalty law in Connecticut in 1990.

#ad#Some people might call this flip-flopping. I believe flip-flopping deserves better. Proper flip-flopping would require Blumenthal to tender some sort of rationale for recanting his once passionately held belief that the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder and carries too much risk of executing innocent people. The 1990-era Blumenthal also predicated his opposition to the death penalty on the claim that it was too expensive -- an argument now being made by Steven Hayes's defense attorney.

No, Blumenthal is not flip-flopping. As he did with his sometimes blurry, sometimes false statements about his military service during the Vietnam War, Connecticut's cunning attorney general is trying to mislead Connecticut voters about who he is. Words are cheap, and Blumenthal has been taking advantage of that to paper over what, to him, amounts to an inconvenient record on the death penalty.

The stakes are high. Blumenthal finds himself running for the U.S. Senate at a time when Connecticut residents are, understandably, not receptive to esoteric and legalistic arguments against capital punishment. The people of Connecticut want justice to be served in the Cheshire home-invasion case.

But the fact is that when Blumenthal had the power to reform an unworkable death-penalty law in Connecticut, he instead did everything he could to oppose the reform effort, and he prevailed.

As a Connecticut state senator from 1981 to 1991, I served with Blumenthal, and I was at the forefront of efforts to close the massive loopholes in our state's death-penalty law. Enacted in 1977, the statute never resulted in a single execution because of the broad allowances it made for mitigating factors.

In 1990, the judiciary committee and the house of representatives sent a bill to the senate that was modeled closely on Florida's court-tested capital-punishment law. But when the bill came to the senate floor, Blumenthal conspired with his liberal colleagues to send it back to committee for 'more study.'

It was a transparent effort to duck behind a procedural motion. The proceedings came late in the session, when the judiciary committee had concluded all its work and essentially adjourned. Sending a bill back to the committee was therefore a death sentence -- not for murderers, but for the bill. This was perfectly clear to everyone in the senate chamber that day.

Blumenthal not only cast that vote, but was one of the bill's most prominent opponents. As a former U.S. Attorney, he was someone others in the Democratic caucus looked to for guidance on legal matters, and he was one of their main speakers on the bill. Thanks in part to his efforts, the proposed death-penalty law -- one that would have made capital punishment a reality in Connecticut -- was defeated.

#page#In this year's U.S. Senate campaign, Blumenthal has thus far been spared of having a spotlight put on that episode by the fact that the appropriate changes to Connecticut's death-penalty statute were ultimately made, long after he left the legislature. Otherwise, the weak death-penalty law he sought to preserve would have kept Steven Hayes off of death row, and Blumenthal would be required to answer directly for that.

To my mind, he still needs to answer for it. What happened after his departure from the senate doesn't exonerate him for thwarting the will of the public on this monumentally important issue when his vote and his voice actually mattered.

#ad#Were it 1990, he might explain himself by offering substantive arguments about why the death penalty is bad policy. But it's 2010, and he's running for the U.S. Senate in a down-to-the-wire race, so his response is, 'I believe that Mr. Hayes deserves the death penalty,' and, 'I support it because it is a deterrent to certain kinds of crimes.'

Is that flip-flopping, or is it just more deception from someone who has already exhibited an unseemly willingness to prey on voters' deeply held values to earn political points he doesn't deserve?

-- Tom Scott is a former state senator and radio-talk-show host from Connecticut.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on October 14, 2010 (boomark / email).