Law, Not Court, Saved Cop’s Killer;

And Bring Back The Mental Hospital

People who support capital punishment should not get too upset at Connecticut’s Supreme Court for overturning on a 4-3 vote a jury’s death sentence for Terry Johnson, who shot state Trooper Russell Bagshaw to death in 1991 after burglarizing a gun shop in North Windham.

For if the court’s decision seems bizarre — essentially that the murder, accomplished with 17 gunshots, wasn’t cruel and depraved enough to merit capital punishment — it is only because Connecticut’s death penalty law is itself a bit bizarre.

That is, the law was enacted as an unholy compromise of an uncompromisable issue by a legislature that wanted to have capital punishment in theory but not in practice and thereby try to please everyone. And so the law has reserved the death penalty for those killers seem to take pleasure in their victims’ suffering and who cannot offer any mitigation for what turned them into killers. The law says the intent to kill and the killing itself are not enough to deprive a killer of his own life; there has to be something more, something worse.

Of course the Supreme Court might have found that, as a matter of policy, there indeed is something worse inherent in the murder of a law officer. The court might have found that such a murder is compounded in its cruelty and heinousness by virtue of an officer’s embodying the protection of all society. But the court’s decision in the Johnson case was not implausible, and, given the objection to capital punishment in principle that some of the court’s members seem to have, it was not all that surprising.

If Connecticut wants the murder of a law officer to be punishable by death, without such difficult conditions, it can legislate as much at any time; so far it has declined to do so, thereby leaving the Supreme Court justices who are opposed to capital punishment free to construe the law’s restraint even more tightly. And of course if Connecticut ever wants to make all lives lost through murder equal in the eyes of the law, in terms of equal punishment, it can qualify all such killers for the death penalty and thereby begin what well might become an assembly line of lethal injection at the prison in Somers. Connecticut is far from such a situation, but down that road lies the risk of false convictions and wrongful executions.

In any event Connecticut can not accept the claim made by some foes of capital punishment that it is simply unconstitutional, since both the state and federal constitutions expressly provide for it after due process of law. And after the Johnson case neither can Connecticut pretend very well that it both has and doesn’t have capital punishment. If capital punishment can’t be justified for the murder of a law officer, it can’t be justified for anything.

When a disturbed 18-year-old from Old Lyme shot at police there the other day and, three days later, held a gun to the head of a sheriff in New London Superior Court before being subdued, his parents told the old story of mental illness. No one could treat the young man very well for long and he couldn’t be confined, so they knew that something bad was going to happen.

On the day the disturbed man’s parents told their story, it was reported that the Rowland administration is negotiating again with a Boston real estate company to find a buyer for the former Norwich State Hospital property along the Thames River in Norwich and Preston.

But even more than Connecticut needs to put the old hospital property to use for economic development, the state needs to find a way of treating the chronically mentally ill like that young man from Old Lyme, now that the state’s mental hospitals have been mostly closed and most chronically mentally ill are beyond supervision.

As imperfect as the old mental hospitals were, they managed to keep the chronics off the street, where so many of them now dwell. The outpatient treatment that has replaced the mental hospitals fails many of the mentally ill because they cannot be compelled to take their medicine regularly and because Connecticut has not yet enacted legislation to force them to be medicated.

Governor Rowland has appointed a commission to report on the state’s mental health system, and its recommendations won’t come a minute too soon. But the current system can’t be acceptable when every week brings a new example of the need for the mental hospitals Connecticut seems to have thought itself enlightened to have done away with.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.