Connecticut received its report card Thursday on how well its students are learning science, and it's not a pretty picture.

Scores from the U.S. Department of Education show that on national science tests, the achievement gap between low-income Connecticut students and their more affluent peers continues to be the largest in the nation. The gap between black and Hispanic students and their white peers is also one of the worst in the country.

"Our gaps have not closed. We are the worst in the country," said Renée Savoie, an official at the State Department of Education, which oversees these tests known as the "nation's report card."

Nationwide, white students' scores rose by 1 point, the scores of black students rose by 3 points, and those of Hispanic students went up by 5 points.

Whereas in Connecticut, white students' test scores rose by 1 point, black students' scores by 2, and those of Hispanic students went up by 3.

Of the 3,000 Connecticut students tested, the average score for a city student was 137 compared with 161 for suburban and rural students.

In November, the same gap was reflected for Connecticut students on national math and reading tests.

This report card comes two days after state legislators almost unanimously approved a sweeping education bill aimed at closing the gap. The education reform bill appropriates nearly $90 million in new money to improve the state's lowest-performing districts, most of which are urban.

"Our cities are performing significantly lower on many accounts... That's not new," said Savoie, who has worked at the state education department for 12 years. "We are not seeing the kind of movement we need to see and [that] other states have."

State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, the leader of the state's Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, has called this difference in student achievement in Connecticut a longstanding "national embarrassment," while Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, on numerous occasions, has referred to it as "civil rights issues of our time."

"Change ... is necessary. While the world changed, and while states around us changed, Connecticut stood still," Malloy told state legislators early Thursday, poised to sign the education reform bill.

"It's too soon to know if these changes will impact these differences in our students' achievement. It's all about implementation," Savoie said.

Malloy said at a Thursday afternoon press conference, "We have a whole new toolbox in education to bring about reform. Connecticut [has been] dead in the water."

"If properly implemented, our state will surge ahead of other states... The commissioner [of education] needs to implement, implement and then he needs to implement."

Holder-Winfield, chairman of the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, led the debate in the House on the legislation (SB 364), which now goes to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who sought the bill and is expected to sign it.

“This important legislation will correct issues in the Racial Profiling Prohibition Act championed by the late Sen. Alvin Penn, and incorporate suggestions made by activist David Samuels and the Community Party,” Holder-Winfield said.

The bill modifies the 1999 law, which currently requires police departments to forward data on traffic stops to the Commission on African-American Affairs to assess for evidence of racial profiling.

The new law sets standards for reporting the information and shifts responsibility for its analysis from the Commission on African-American Affairs to the Office of Policy and Management, which has staff and resources unavailable to the commission.

The new legislation also allows OPM to withhold public safety-related state funds from communities that don't comply.

According to 2010 data, only 27 of the state’s police departments complied with the reporting aspect of the law and the data that has been reported hasn’t been assessed by the state.

Holder-Winfield, vice chairman of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, praised the leadership of the committee’s House chairman, Rep. Gerald Fox III (D-Stamford), and other legislators for their support in the passage of House Bill 5501.

The legislation is based on the recommendations of a task force chaired by former Connecticut Supreme Court Justice David Borden. The task force recommended that whenever a suspect is among those participating in a photo or live lineup, each participant be presented sequentially so that the eyewitness views only one photograph or one person at a time.

“As we have seen too many times, mistakes can be made during suspect lineups and can lead to wrongful convictions,” Holder-Winfield said. “The standards set with this legislation will bring more accuracy and fairness to the system and hopefully reduce misidentifications and wrongful convictions.”

The bill also expands the instructions police officers must give to eyewitnesses in advance of a lineup including that:

• they will be asked to view an array of photographs or a group of people, and that each photograph or person will be presented one at a time;
• it is as important to exclude innocent persons as it is to identify the perpetrator;
• the person in a lineup may not look exactly as he or she did on the date of the offense because features like facial and head hair can change;
• the perpetrator may or may not (current law says only “may”) be in the lineup;
• police will continue to investigate the offense regardless of whether the eyewitness makes an identification.

Current police procedures require, when possible, that the officer conducting a lineup does not know which individual is the suspect, that eyewitnesses must be told they should not feel compelled to make an identification and they should take as much time as needed in making a decision.

Holder-Winfield, vice chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a member of the Education Committee, received the recognition for showing a strong commitment to early childhood issues in his district and at the legislature.

“Rep. Holder-Winfield has been a strong advocate for children’s issues since he became a state representative in 2008,” said Maggie Adair, executive director of the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance. “He understands how important it is for a child to be healthy, safe and ready to learn. “He has taken a special interest in grade-level reading and early literacy, making sure children acquire this important life skill.”

“I’m honored to receive this recognition and want to thank everyone at the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance for this award,” Holder-Winfield said. “I can’t emphasize enough the importance of the work done by the alliance. If we are to achieve true reform in education, we must start improving early childhood learning.”

The Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance is a statewide membership and advocacy organization committed to improving developmental outcomes in the areas of learning, health, safety and economic security for children ages birth to eight.

When members of the State House of Representatives passed a bill ending Connecticut's death penalty Wednesday night — all but ensuring the success of abolition — they also ended a history of legislative failure.

While the current repeal bill is en route to the desk of Gov. Dannel Malloy, who has pledged to sign it, former Republican Gov. Jodi Rell vetoed a similar bill in 2009 and another passed the Judiciary Committee in 2011, but failed to reach the House floor after two lawmakers withdrew support at the last minute, citing the ongoing trials of the infamous 2007 triple homicide in Cheshire, Conn. A combination of the surge of momentum created by both lawmakers and activists, the amendment to the bill imposing additional restrictions on those who would have previously received the death penalty, and the time elapsed since the Cheshire trials contributed to the success of the 2012 repeal effort.

State Rep. Roland Lemar, a Democrat who represent New Haven, called the bill's passage a "Herculean effort." The recent failures to repeal the death penalty followed four other failed attempts in the past two decades, he said.

Years after the Cheshire incident, in which William Petit's wife and two teenage daughters were murdered and he was badly injured, the trials have loomed large in the debates about repeal in Hartford since 2009.

"The crimes that were committed on that brutal July night were so far out of the range of normal understanding that now, more than three years later, we still find it difficult to accept that they happened in one of our communities," Rell said in her veto statement in 2009. "I have long believed that there are certain crimes so heinous, so depraved, that society is best served by imposing the ultimate sanction on the criminal."

The cases — in which both perpetrators, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, were sentenced to death — figured prominently in the 2011 Connecticut Senate debates. Petit's testimony against repeal triggered the reversal of two key votes, dooming the bill for the rest of the legislative session.

As the Cheshire trials faded from local and national headlines, lawmakers became more receptive to the arguments made by anti-death penalty advocates, said State Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney, also a New Haven Democrat and a leader of the 2012 repeal effort.

"This year, the [Cheshire murder] trials weren't taking place concurrently with discussion about legislation," Lemar said. "[Petit] did not come himself to testify, and senators did not have the consistent reminders of the tragedies in the back of their minds, and that allowed some of them to view it more as a matter of public policy than one of personal vengeance and retribution."

Looney also cited a "gradual building of momentum" around new information about the death penalty's administration as a reason for the current bill's success. In particular, he emphasized the inconsistency in the implementation of the death penalty, with records showing that some individuals on death row have committed crimes that are nearly identical to those of others who were not sentenced to capital punishment.

State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, a sponsor of the bill and a New Haven Democrat, also attributed the bill's increased support in part to the work of outside groups, including the Yale College Democrats.

"When I came in 2009, the only voices you were hearing were the voices of people who wanted to maintain the death penalty," said, Holder-Winfield, who was a leader of last year's repeal effort. "The work that Yale students, the NAACP, and others have done has added to the voices of those who want the death penalty abolished."

Not all who hoped for the death penalty's repeal were completely satisfied with the final version of the bill, which replaces the death penalty with life in solitary confinement without the possibility of parole.

Both Holder-Winfield and Dems President Zak Newman '13 said they were unhappy with this enhanced punishment, which entails additional limitations such as restrictions on visiting hours, but acknowledged that it was necessary in order to ultimately pass the bill. They also said they were dissatisfied with the fact that the bill would not prevent the 11 people on the state's death row from receiving capital punishment — a feature of the bill that its critics fiercely disputed, arguing that repeal would supply legal ammunition for the appeal of capital sentences of death row inmates.

"Of course it was a compromise. That's what you do in legislatures — you compromise to get things done," Holder-Winfield said. "It wouldn't have passed the Senate without this extra provision."

Once Malloy signs the bill, Connecticut will be the 17th state, in addition to the District of Columbia, to repeal the death penalty.

Kenneth Ireland believes he was spared the death penalty because of his age. He was 16 when the crime occurred. He also believes State’s Attorney Michael Dearington, who is not typically known for bringing many death penalty cases aside from the Petit murders, may have spared his life by not seeking the death penalty.

Ireland spoke in the lobby of the Legislative Office Building on Tuesday, the eve of a House vote to repeal the death penalty. The Senate passed the bill last Thursday morning on a 20-16 vote after 10 hours of debate.

Ireland said he heard the vote in the House on Wednesday may be close this year, and he hopes lawmakers will think about his story before they push the button.

Death penalty abolitionists and their lobbyists weren’t willing to say how close the vote may be, but the last time the House voted for repeal in 2009 it passed 90-56. The legislation was later vetoed by former Gov. M. Jodi Rell.

This year is different. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said he would sign a prospective repeal bill that impacts any future convicts. The bill passed by the Senate last week exempts the 11 men currently on death row.

As the abolition movement gained momentum this year, opponents of repeal like Sen. John Kissel, R-Enfield, started thinking about ways to amend the legislation to make sure those serving life in prison without parole were treated to the worst conditions.

“If we are going to move in that direction as a state, I would far prefer to have some area of, if not isolation, then creating a separate section for these individuals to serve out their time,” Kissel said during the public hearing on the bill in March.

Ireland was bounced around from prison to prison, including a five-year stint in Virginia when former Gov. John G. Rowland shipped prisoners out of state to address overcrowding.

“Prison, any part of prison, even the best possible parts of prison are just horrible, horrific places to be,” Ireland said. “There’s never a moment of peace. There’s never a moment of calm. You never get any relaxation.”

Ireland said he spent about a year in segregation in a cell that was nearest to death row.

At the time, there were only two other men on death row aside from serial killer Michael Ross, who ended his appeals and was executed in 2005.

Ireland said he had a job cleaning the floor on death row.

“There’s no doubt in my mind why Michael Ross chose to check out,” Ireland said. “It’s a terrible, terrible living condition.”

Ireland said he doesn’t have an opinion on the amendment which would keep those convicted of capital murder in conditions mirroring death row.

Sen. President Donald Williams, D-Brooklyn, said Tuesday that the amendment came about after he and Sens. Martin Looney, Carlo Leone, Joseph Crisco, and Edith Prague toured both Northern Correctional Institution and MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, where many of those serving life sentences are housed.

At Northern, which received its first inmate in 1995, everything is low to the ground and the entire place is gray, Williams said. “It gives off a sense of foreboding.”

Things are different at MacDougall-Walker, which was built before Northern in 1993.

Williams said MacDougall-Walker is not excessively punitive and prisoners are in their cells 17 to 20 hours a day. But when the lawmakers arrived, Williams said, they went to a pod where 60 to 80 prisoners were milling about in the center area recreating.

“The impression we got touring MacDougall was there were noticeable recreation areas,” Williams said.

And while Correction officials say recreation and television are important to maintaining discipline, lawmakers were interested in “another level of life in prison without release,” Williams said.

Williams said he hoped the amendment would convince members of the House who may be on the fence regarding their vote Wednesday.

Some have expressed concern in private that the legislationmay not be constitutional even though Democratic senators defended it.

Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, said that since the amendment was not in the bill when it was passed out of the Judiciary Committee, he hasn’t had time to study it and say with confidence that it’s constitutional.

He said he was going to be looking at the language Tuesday night to make a determination. Given that Judiciary Committee Co-Chairman Sen. Eric Coleman believes it passes constitutional muster, Holder-Winfield said he anticipated that he would likely come to the same conclusion.

Holder-Winfield has criticized similar proposals, arguing that there are already people in the general inmate population who have committed similar crimes but weren’t sentenced to death, and yet no lawmaker has ever moved to create special confinement circumstances for those inmates.

But Holder-Winfield, the Judiciary Committee’s vice chair, has been advocating for the repeal of the death penalty for years and the change likely helped the bill through the Senate by a comfortable margin.

“It’s not the worst thing we could do,” he said.

Whether the new conditions will have a negative impact on safety within prisons will likely depend on how the inmates are treated, he said, adding that more restrictive settings don’t necessarily make inmates more prone to violence.

“But there’s a difference between being restricted and being repressed,” he said.

While it may have helped in the Senate, Holder-Winfield didn’t think the amendment would have much of an impact on the vote in the House.

State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield is so closely associated with the drive to repeal Connecticut's death penalty that he says someone once asked him, "Do you work on anything else?"

In fact, the two-term Democrat from New Haven noted that he has been involved in several high-profile issues at the Capitol, from transgender civil rights to an effort to ensure all kids are reading by third grade.

"But the death penalty gets more press," Holder-Winfield said Tuesday, the day before the House of Representatives is scheduled to debate the future of capital punishment in Connecticut.

Last week, the Senate voted to repeal the state's long-standing but seldom-used death penalty. Instead of execution, those convicted of the most serious crimes would face life in prison without possibility of release.

Both supporters and critics expect the bill to win approval in the House after a lengthy debate.

It's a cause Holder-Winfield, now vice chairman of the legislature's judiciary committee, has championed since arriving at the Capitol after his election in 2008. The following year, he helped shepherd the bill through the legislature only to watch with disappointment as then-Gov.M. Jodi Rellveto it. (This year, Gov.Dannel P. Malloyhas pledged to sign the measure, which is written to apply only to future crimes and, at least in theory, will not stop the 11 men currently on death row from being executed.)

Back in 2009, Holder-Winfield was a freshman in a place where seniority is key, yet he "did the heavy lifting" on the bill, said Michael Lawlor, who chaired the judiciary committee for 16 years before leaving the General Assembly to take a job as the Malloy administration's undersecretary for criminal justice matters. Lawlor stressed he was speaking as a former lawmaker who worked closely on the judiciary committee with Holder-Winfield and not in his official capacity as a member of Malloy's team.

Holder-Winfield won over lawmakers not through passionate persuasion but by listening as they hashed out the difficult legal, political, ethical and moral questions that swirl around capital punishment, Lawlor said.

Holder-Winfield's main strategy "was just talking it through with people, [he] helped them develop a level of comfort," Lawlor said. And, Lawlor added, "he got people to think about it in the world here at the Capitol where there are a million things to be distracted by."

Rep. John Hetherington, a death penalty supporter, sits next to Holder-Winfield on the committee.

"He's a strong and determined advocate," said Hetherington, a Republican from New Canaan. "But he's always respectful of other people's viewpoints. Sometimes I say to him, 'I wish I could vote with you Gary' and he'll say 'You have to do what you think is right.'"

He has also reached out to fellow lawmakers and constituents as one of the General Assembly's most prolific users of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, as well as old-school face-to-face meetings. The tools have been helpful, he said, because some of the causes he's championed are not, at first glance, among the most politically popular.

"Most of the issues I take on are issues people have to struggle with," he said. "My position is, what other people see as improbable, I see as possible."

Holder-Winfield, 38, grew up in the Bronx, raised by his mother after his father succumbed to drugs, according to his official biography. He served in the Navy and now works for the American Association of University Professors.

He said his opposition to the death penalty is rooted in a belief that it is unjust and the wrong public policy for the state. He has spoken to former Rep. William Dyson, whose seat he now holds, and former House Speaker Irving Stolberg, who has since died. Both men fought vigorously against the death penalty during their time at the Capitol.

Faith also plays a role. Born Catholic, Holder-Winfield attended Catholic school and now identifies himself as a Baptist. "Jesus Christ," he noted, "was executed by the state."

"It is my opinion that in this session of education this is the bill," Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, said. "This is the bill we should be doing."

The bill written over the past year by the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus creates a standardized assessment to ensure that students achieve a basic standard of reading by the third grade. The original bill would have made sure students unable to read at goal by the end of their third grade year were held back and given the tools necessary to catch up with their peers.

But the cost, estimated by one lawmaker at $100 million, was too much for the Appropriations Committee.

Instead, the bill the committee passed Tuesday expanded an existing pilot program to an additional 11 schools. Currently 11 schools in six districts participate in a pilot program funded with private money the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus found to start the program. The bill would fund a total of 22 schools and appropriates $1 million for the pilot.

In addition it gives the state Department of Education about $500,000 to develop a coinciding professional development program where teachers would learn how to help students improve their reading skills.

Rep. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, said what the committee should be looking at is the cost to the state if it doesn't pass more robust legislation in this area.

"Think about the money we'll save down the road if we can teach a child how to read," McCrory said. "The kid who reads won't go to jail."

However, the legislature's fiscal notes don't take into account the long term impacts of these types of policies only the immediate budget implications.

Holder-Winfield said he understands the "exorbitant cost" is why the bill was modified.

But simply leaving the assessment tools in there to help identify the child who can't read without giving them the tools they need to improve rings a little hollow, he said.

Republican lawmakers seemed to agree.

In support of Holder-Winfield's comments, Rep. Terrie Wood, R-Darien, said she thinks the bill is "why we are here."

"It is one of the most important bills we'll be doing despite maybe disagreements on some of the points," Wood said.

And the unions, who keep butting heads with the governor over his proposed education reforms, are supportive of the legislation.

Eric Bailey, spokesman for AFT Connecticut, has called the bill a "tremendous effort toward addressing one of the critical factors of learning, which is reading."

The long drive to abolish the death penalty in Connecticut marked another milestone Wednesday when it cleared a key legislative committee.

The 24-19 vote in the judiciary committee broke largely along party lines and came on the same day a new Quinnipiac University poll was released, showing broad support for capital punishment among state residents.

"Connecticut voters said, 62-31 [percent], that repeal was a bad idea," Sen. John Kissel of Enfield, the ranking Republican on the committee. "For those of my colleagues who feel that they know better, I would say that the people of Connecticut are pretty darn smart. They know that we use the death penalty pretty rarely, but they believe that it has a valuable function in our state."

The poll of 1,622 registered voters in Connecticut was conducted March 14-19 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

Gary Holder-Winfield, a Democrat from New Haven who is the legislature's leading voice against capital punishment, questioned the poll's value. He noted that the survey asked only whether abolishing the death penalty is "a good idea or a bad idea." But in previous polls, when respondents are given a choice between the death penalty and life in prison without the possibility of release, the gap between supporters and opponents has narrowed considerably.

"The state is basically split in half," Holder-Winfield said.

Quinnipiac has polled on the death penalty on nine occasions since June 2000. In most of those surveys, the poll asked whether residents favored or opposed the death penalty and the breakdown was generally around 2-to-1 in support of capital punishment.

However, when a follow-up question has been asked — do you favor the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of release — support for the death penalty fell below 50 percent (reaching an all-time low of 37 percent in favor of capital punishment in January 2005, the last death penalty survey conducted before a triple homicide in Cheshire in the summer of 2007 that has shaped much of the debate.)

At a news conference several hours before the judiciary committee vote, Quinnipiac Poll Director Doug Schwartz cited a May 2009 poll, which found residents favoring the death penalty by a 2-to-1 ratio, even though that survey also gave respondents the option of choosing life in prison without the possibility of release. "We found virtually the same numbers that we did today," he said
To some lawmakers, poll numbers don't matter. "This must never be a matter of a poll," said Sen. Ed Meyer, a Democrat from Guilford who believes the death penalty should be abolished.

"We can't vote on life-and-death issues because of a poll," Meyer added. "A poll depends a great deal on how the question is phrased ... [and] you don't vote on issues of conscience on the basis of a poll."

Rep. T.R. Rowe, a Republican from Trumbull, also voted to back the bill. "In an effort to promote a culture of life, that we ought to value all human life, all the life that God has put on this earth ... I'm going to support the repeal today," said Rowe, one of just two Republicans to vote yes (the other was Rep. Richard Smith of New Fairfield.)

And Sen. Beth Bye, a Democrat from West Hartford, invoked Gandhi and said the death penalty is fraught with the potential for errors.

Even if the bill becomes law, the 11 men currently on Connecticut's death row will be grandfathered in and could still face execution. Only one man, serial killer Michael Ross, has been put to death in the state since 1960.

The bill now goes to the Senate, where it has traditionally faced a challenge. Last year, after clearing the committee, supporters of repeal expressed cautious optimism, thanks largely to the election of Gov.Dannel P. Malloy, a capital punishment foe.

But the issue never came up for a vote in the Senate after after Democratic Sens. Edith Prague and Andrew Maynard announced their opposition to the repeal bill. Both lawmakers cited the brutal home invasion in Cheshire and the persuasion of Dr. William Petit, the sole survivor, as reasons for their reversal.

This year, Maynard has indicated he will likely back the bill, but Prague has yet to publicly reveal her stance.

Meanwhile, another longtime death penalty opponent, Sen. Andrew Roraback, announced he would not vote for the measure unless lawmakers also repealed an early-release program for prisoners. Roraback, R-Goshen, is running for Congress from the 5th District and has weathered heavy criticism from some of his Republican opponents for his ant-capital punishment philosophy.

On Wednesday, Roraback offered an amendment to the death penalty bill that would eliminate the early-release program, which he says represents a breach of faith to crime victims. The amendment failed and Roraback voted against the death penalty for the first time is his legislative career.

"For 18 years, I've served in the General Assembly and for 18 years, I've been of the belief that the state should not be in the business of extinguishing life," Roraback said. "For the 18 years I have served in the General Assembly, I have felt equally strong that the state should not be in the business of breaking faith with the victims of crime."

At least one lawmaker is sick of hearing excuses from local police about why they haven’t been complying with a 1999 law requiring them to report traffic stop data to determine if they are racially profiling motorists.

That lawmaker is Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, who had a lively exchange with members of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, during a public hearing on a bill that would strengthen the Alvin Penn Racial Prohibition Act. The law currently requires police departments to forward data on traffic stops to the African American Affairs Commission for assessment.

However, few departments comply with the requirements and the African American Affairs Commission has yet to release an evaluation of the data.

The police chiefs told the committee that they supports the bill but cautioned against using the data to cast the state’s law enforcement community as engaged in race-based policing.

“I don’t think it helps anybody to paint with a wide brush Connecticut law enforcement as being insensitive racial minorities and ethnic minorities,” South Windsor Police Chief Matt Reed said.

Holder-Winfield, the committee’s vice chair who also championed the bill last year, took exception to the statement.

“Those of us who have been speaking about this have been very careful in choosing our words and saying that’s not the case, and yet you bring this to us as if that’s what’s going on,” he said.

Holder-Winfield, a Democrat from New Haven, said the association claimed to be supportive of the bill, but wants to see changes to how the data that’s collected gets evaluated. At the same time, they aren’t able to tell lawmakers what those changes might be, he said.

“I have to tell you, being honest, that I believe that most police officers are doing their job. But when you approach this situation in the way that you’re approaching it, I don’t really feel you’re being as helpful as can be,” he said.

Telling lawmakers what isn’t working is not as helpful as coming with ideas for how to make the system work, he said.

But the police focused mostly on the shortcomings of the current system. They expressed frustration with the lack of guidance regarding exactly what they’re supposed to be reporting.

According to 2010 data only 27 of the state’s 92 police departments have consistently submitted reports on traffic stops.

Reed questioned whether that was a fair assessment of police compliance. He said his department has collected the data every year but the Chief State’s Attorney’s Office has never specified a format for reporting it.

“I don’t agree that only 27 are complying because I know there are departments in the position I’m in, where we’ve collected the data, I’ve got a huge database of data. I don’t know what information is considered a ‘summary.’ What data do you want to be sent out?” he asked.

Reed tried to explain the host of different reporting possibilities departments could provide, but Cromwell Police Chief Anthony Salvatore interrupted.

“I think we can recognize the system is broken and rather than pointing fingers, or he said she said, we’re here to tell you we support fixing the system,” he said.

Salvatore said if someone was actually evaluating the data, police departments would be more inclined to submit it. Instead, they’ve gotten mixed signals from the African American Affairs Commission and the Chief State’s Attorney’s Office.

Holder-Winfield rejected the argument.

“The police, who I think do a wonderful job on the whole, are tasked with enforcing the law. When the police look at a law and say, ‘no one is doing the other part of the law so we’re not going to do our part, which requires we submit the data,’ there is an issue,” he said.

Reed said the association wanted to see a scientific system be put in place to evaluate the data to determine whether its indicative of racial profiling. It’s unclear to police what the statistical benchmark for racial profiling is, he said.

“What will be seen as satisfactory in the eyes of those who will be questioning whether we are engaged in race-based policing,” he said. “We don’t know what the standard is.”

Everyone seemed to agree on a provision bill that shifts the responsibility of evaluating the data to the Office of Policy and Management. Glenn Cassis, executive director of the African Americans Affairs Commission, said with just two staff members, his agency doesn’t have the resources to evaluate data on thousands of traffic stops.

“They have the resources. We don’t have it in our office. For the last couple years our budget has been cut and we’re down to just two staff members,” he said.

Sandra Staub, legal director of the ACLU in Connecticut, went over the history of the legislation late last year for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

She said the chief state’s attorney had from 1999 until 2003 to develop a uniform way for police departments to report their data, but he never did. The reporting responsibilities were then handed over to the African-American Affairs Commission, which has yet to produce a complete report.

This year’s legislation would require the Office of Policy and Management to collect the data and complete the reports.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s administration did not support similar legislation last year. However, his administration found a $1.2 million federal Department of Transportation grant that was about to expire to put toward the collection of this data.

“It appears that for the past five years federal funding has been available to pay for racial identity data gathering and analysis,” Malloy said in January. “I cannot speak to the actions of the previous administration in allowing these funds to languish, but I can assure Connecticut residents that my administration is committed to enforcing the laws on the books and has moved forward to get this data collected, reported, and evaluated.”

HARTFORD — State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, keeps his focus on calculating early reading skills with one statistic in mind.

“They build prisons based on how you read by third grade,” said Holder-Winfield.

Children lacking basic reading skills this early in their academic careers find it harder and harder to advance, with many adding to the drop out rate and later an inability to compete on the job market, he said.

Holder, as chairman of the Black and Hispanic Caucus, is behind a bill that puts an intense emphasis on reading skills pre-kindergarten through third grade, a focus that has gotten the support of the administration as it works out the specifics of its education reform package.

At third grade, about 50 percent of Hispanic students, 48 percent of African-Americans and 18 percent of whites score below proficient on the third grade mastery test, he said.

“That’s huge. Going from that point forward, you no longer are being taught to read, you are learning from the reading that you do. They can’t keep up. We have to do something,” Holder-Winfield said.

“We say we don’t socially promote people, but I’m wondering how these kids graduate. You can’t be promoting them because of what they have achieved at school. Call it what we want, but it is social promotion,” the representative said.

The bill calls for better training for teachers, good data to get to the root of each child’s difficulty with the task and 90-minute uninterrupted reading periods.

State Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor praised the caucus and Holder-Winfield for their efforts and said there is $300,000 available next year for a pilot program around early intervention on reading.

For children who need it, there will be supplemental instruction and remediation plans that could include an extended school day, participation in after-school programs, Saturday sessions, an extended school year or transition classes.

Holder-Winfield is proposing students lacking the skills by the end of third grade not be promoted to fourh grade, but rather be assigned to attend summer school with more reading instruction or enter a transition program.

“Perhaps we create a different type of education in that next year for those students where it is more reading intensive than it has been to get them back on track by the middle of the next year ... we must do something about this issue,” he said.

There would be some exceptions, such as students with limited English language skills who have received less than two years help as English language learners, and some special education students.

Holder-Winfield also wants to decrease the number of students who are mistakenly put in special education classes, but whose real problem is a lack of reading skills.

“They don’t belong there and we don’t actually fix their problems. We need to do something so that when we are finished dealing with these kids, they are back where they need to be,” he said.

The New Haven representative has been critical that nothing has been done for so long. Connecticut has the largest gap nationally between its largely low-income minority students and its higher-income white students on achievement tests.

Lawmakers and civil rights groups called on Monday for an overhaul of the state’s under-enforced racial profiling reporting law in light of a recent newspaper report that found police are tougher on minorities during traffic stops.

The Capitol press conference was held in response to the most recent demonstration of racial disparity in the state—an article finding that Black and Hispanic drivers were more likely to come away from a traffic stop with a ticket or citation than white drivers.

Isaias T. Diaz, chairman of the Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission, said it was evidence the 1999 Alvin Penn Racial Prohibition Act needed a significant overhaul. The law currently requires police departments to forward data on traffic stops to the African American Affairs Commission for assessment.

Diaz recommended the task of assessing the prevalence of racial profiling be handled by a new independent monitoring team appointed by Michael Lawlor, the governor’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy.

The group, which would be housed under the Office of Policy and Management, would have the discretionary capacity to withdraw funding from police departments that are not complying with the law, he said. Right now only 27 of the state’s 92 municipal police departments comply with the act.

“There be some sort of disincentive for noncompliance or some sort of penalty,” he said.

Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D- New Haven, said he was frustrated and upset that another press conference had to be held to address an issue the legislature should have addressed last year, when a similar bill quietly died in the Planning and Development Committee. No one in the state Capitol has any legitimate reason to work against the bill, he said.

“I am tired of people in this state who don’t happen to be of the majority population having to worry about the police,” he said. “They have to worry about when they get stopped whether they’ll be treated differently.”

Holder-Winfield said he wasn’t against profiling if it’s done correctly. For instance, saying the profile was a 6’4” black man with a beard and a jacket was acceptable, he said.

“But when you tell me the profile is a black man, I have a problem,” he said.

Rep. Kelvin Roldan, D- Hartford, said the newspaper report, coupled with the FBI’s arrest of four East Haven police officers for harassing Latinos in January, confirms the state has a racial discrimination problem.

“There is rampant profiling and violations of civil rights, not just of African-Americans across the state but it seems that recently the target of Latinos has been taking place,” he said.

Roldan said Diaz’s suggestions were a step in the right direction, but he also thought the executive branch should ask the courts to appoint a special master to supervise police departments that don’t comply with the law.

Though the report analyzed more than 100,000 traffic tickets by what the police officer marked down as the race of the offender, Adam Osmond said both he and his wife have gotten tickets where the officer inaccurately labeled them white.

“I don’t think anyone in this room could confuse me for being white,” he said. “In my opinion this was done in order to lower the percentage of black people and increase the percentage of white people.”

Osmond said he believes it’s an attempt to misinform the statewide database. If police are willing to lie on an official document, he questioned what else may be wrong with the data.

Douglas S. Fuchs, president of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, said the newspaper report doesn’t reflect how police officers across the state behave.

“We believe that the entire data collection process is inadequate and flawed and what little analysis conducted by non state entities thus far does not, in any way, accurately portray how Connecticut law enforcement across the state conducts business,” he said in a statement.

Fuchs said departments across the state have sent in data, which has never been analyzed. Other departments have been improperly advised on what to do with it, he said. The association has and will continue to have discussions with the African-American Affairs commission around the data collection and analysis, he said.

Fuchs agreed that agencies that do not comply with the law should be held accountable.

Testifying during a public hearing on last year’s version, Chiefs James Strallacci and Anthony Salvatore said the current law had become ineffective.

Initially the Chief State’s Attorney’s Office took the data from departments and issued one report. Last year an ACLU lawyer argued that the chief state’s attorney had from 1999 to 2003 to develop a uniform way for police departments to report their data, but he never did In 2003, the responsibility was shifted to the African-American Affairs Commission.

The association argued that since then, the departments that have continued to comply with the law have been sending data “into a vacuum from which no reports issued.” For that reason, they approved of making the assessment OPM’s responsibility.

But the association had concerns about other aspects of the bill including a requirement that officers give drivers a copy of a form. That could require departments to put printers in each cruiser, which they considered to be an unfunded mandate. Another requirement that officers print duplicate forms would have prolonged each traffic stop, which they said would “annoy the motorist, and waste police time.”

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, whose administration did not support the legislation last year, said last month that it is unacceptable the law hasn’t been enforced.

“I have directed my staff and the Department of Transportation to ensure police departments continue to collect, or begin to collect, this data and submit it to an appropriate outside evaluator for analysis and report,” he said.

Lawlor said a federal grant with the Department of Transportation the state can use in order to help fund the initiative. The $1.2 million grant has been sitting untouched by the state since 2006.

The state has been working with Central Connecticut State University in assembling an advisory group to find the most effective way to do the analysis, he said.

“All that is very much in progress,” Lawlor said. “If [the legislature] gives that responsibility to OPM we’ll do it and we’ll do it under what they’re recommending.”

HARTFORD (AP) Connecticut lawmakers and civil rights leaders once again are urging the state legislature to amend the racial profiling act to ensure that the law receives proper oversight and enforcement.

Under the current act, Connecticut police departments are not to practice racial profiling and are required to submit annual traffic stop reports and complaints of alleged discriminatory stops to the African-American Affairs Commission for review.

Since enacted in 1999, however, some say the law, championed by the late Bridgeport Sen. Alvin W. Penn, has been largely unenforced by the state due to budgetary and staffing concerns.

Glenn Cassis, executive director of the African-American Affairs Commission said last year only around 27 of the state's police departments collected and reported the data, which is mandated under state law. He said, the number has gone up as more attention has been focused on the issue due to the alleged police discrimination in East Haven, where four police officers were arrested by the FBI. A recent report by The Hartford Courant found racial disparities in police traffic stops.

In an attempt to ultimately strengthen the act, state lawmakers and members of the Latino and Puerto Rican and African-American Affairs Commissions are recommending changes to the bill that would shift the responsibility of data reviewing and reporting to the state's Office of Policy and Management.

Advocates of the amendment say OPM will be better equipped to process traffic stop and other police data, as well as have the ability to penalize departments that do not comply with the law.

Black and Puerto Rican Caucus Chairman, Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, said the renewed effort to pass the proposed changes this session comes in response to the incidents in East Haven. He said he is disappointed that similar legislation on the issue failed to make it out of the General Assembly's Planning and Development Committee last year.

"There is no one in this building who has any legitimate reason why they would vote against or work against a bill to fix the bill that passed in 1999," he said.

Holder-Winfield, however, acknowledged that the majority of Connecticut police officers do not practice racial discrimination.

Redding police Chief Douglas Fuchs, the president of the Police Chiefs Association, said in a statement that police chiefs throughout the state are committed to protecting all citizens equally. He said his association believes that "the entire data collection process is inadequate and flawed" and does not accurately represent law enforcement practices in the state.

He said his association has been in contact with the African-American Affairs Commission regarding diversity training and data collection and analysis.

In January, Malloy called for greater enforcement of the current anti-racial profiling act, by directing his staff, along with the Department of Transportation, to ensure the collection and submission of traffic stop data by police departments for analysis and report.

Isaias Tomas Diaz, the Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission chairman said that despite the governor's push to enforce the current law, the act has systematic problems that need to be addressed.

Because of this, the commission and other advocates say they would like to see legislation passed that places the changes into law, so that future administrations can follow suit.

Mike Lawlor, OPM undersecretary for criminal justice policy, said his office has already begun work to implement some of the proposed changes, due to a $1.2 million federal grant for traffic stop data collection and analysis that has been sitting at the Department of Transportation for the past five years. He said he believes confusion over the grant left it untouched by previous administrations.

With the funding, OPM is creating an advisory group to oversee the data collection, as well as continue expanding its criminal justice information system â€" an online system that streamlines data from all police department and related agency computers. Lawlor said the system, which will be fully integrated by the end of 2013, will allow OPM to process data without having to wait for police department submissions.

He said that although OPM is developing the processes, they will be available to the African-American Affairs Commission if the amendments do not go into effect this session.

Bridgeport Sen. Edwin Gomes said the legislature's Judiciary Committee is likely to raise a bill that would shift responsibility to OPM, as well as set up an advisory committee, including stakeholders, to make sure the law and racial profiling ban are enforced and develop a standardized practice for all police departments to collect traffic stop data.

Family members of murder victims called upon the legislature to abolish the death penalty at a Wednesday press conference, and although a bill is being drafted, it’s unclear if there’s enough support in the Senate to pass it.

Mothers, sisters, and cousins of Connecticut murder victims spoke out against the state’s death penalty system, which they said creates two classes of murder victims — those whose death was important enough to warrant capital punishment, and everyone else.

Khalilah Brown-Dean of New Haven said last year her cousin, Brian Anthony Patterson, was gunned down while he was attending a party.

“Brian’s life mattered,” she said. “There are those who say the death penalty supports us, that it supports families by being the ultimate realization of justice, and yet the arbitrary way in which we decide which murders are more heinous, which lives are more important, leaves us with a system that is far from just.”

Victoria Coward, whose son Tyler was murdered, agreed with Brown-Dean, saying the system focuses attention and resources on the offender while ignoring grieving families. The resources the state spends to prosecute expensive death penalty cases could be better spent on other areas of the criminal justice system, she said.

“This money is not spent in a vacuum. While we spend millions for the occasional capital case, our forensic labs are underfunded so cold cases aren’t being solved. The number of counseling sessions that victims and families receive is capped and many of us go without basic needs,” she said.

Brown-Dean and Coward weren’t alone. Four other family members spoke at the press conference and repeal advocates came with a letter to lawmakers signed by 179 family members.

The group was joined by Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, who is again pushing for repeal. He said it helps to have a different perspective of the position of people impacted by murder.

“For me, this is really to demonstrate to people that when we’ve had the conversations we’ve had about what victims feel, the conversation has not been honest,” he said.

Holder-Winfield said that too often, victims’ feelings are used as an argument for maintaining the death penalty. But not everyone who’s had a loved one murdered feels the same way about having the offender put to death by the state, he said.

But while in the past there has been fairly strong support in the House, a repeal bill would be a tough vote in a Senate that appears to be divided on the issue.

Sen. John Kissel, R-Enfield, said he felt many of the arguments against the death penalty presented at the press conference were false arguments.

“Let’s face it, there’s some crimes that are so horrific that the vast majority of Connecticut citizens feel that the death penalty is appropriate,” he said.

A Quinnipiac poll from last year found voters support the death penalty 67 to 28 percent, however, the number is much closer 48 to 43 percent when given a choice between the death penalty and life in prison without parole.

Kissel said the death penalty serves a valuable function in the criminal justice system. The bill that’s being considered this year would be prospective, so those who already are on death row would remain there.

However, Kissel said a successful repeal of the death penalty statute would be used as the basis for new appeals by those offenders.

Holder-Winfield said he wasn’t sure whether that would happen but said that is not his intention.

“I do not intend to later go back and say we can’t leave people on death row,” he said.

Kissel has long opposed any attempt to abolish the death penalty but it’s the votes of lawmakers who have previously supported the repeal bill that are making passage this year uncertain.

Sen. Edith Prague, D-Columbia, has told reporters she is sitting on the fence over the issue this year. Meanwhile, Sen. Andrew Roraback, the only Republican to vote for repeal the last time there was a vote, is saying he may not do the same this year.

With Roraback’s vote unlikely and Prague’s uncertain, supporters of the bill come up short on the 18 votes necessary for a tie.

Roraback has tied his vote to repeal the death penalty with a vote to repeal an inmate early release program the legislature passed last year. So unless lawmakers scrap the early-release program, he will vote against repealing the death penalty.

Roraback said he still believes the state shouldn’t be putting people to death, but he said he also believes the state shouldn’t break promises to crime victims and their families.

The program, which allows inmates to shave up to five days a month off their prison sentences by participating in programs, breaks that promise, he said.

“In my view the early release bill we passed last year was an unconscionable breach of faith with the victims of crime and their families because it’s going to allow individuals to be released at a sooner date than what was promised,” he said.

Connecting the two issues was the best opportunity he had to call attention to the program, he said. Roraback is currently running for Congress and has been criticized by opponents for his opposition of the death penalty. He said his decision was not a result of the criticisms.

“There’s going to be a lot of noise about a lot of issues that are state issues but those aren’t the issues that matter in my bid for Congress,” he said.

It is unlikely the legislature will vote to stop the program, which is now up and running. Even if they did, Mike Lawlor, the governor’s Undersecretary for Criminal Justice, said it wouldn’t change the credits that have already been applied to inmates’ sentences.

“There’s nothing the legislature can do now that can undo what it did last year,” he said. “I understand people have different emotional and philosophical points of view but as a legal matter you can’t do it.”

Hartford — More money for New Haven? “You’re hurting me,” groaned state Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, as he and two other insiders taste-tested City Hall’s new legislative agenda at the Capitol.

Holder-Winfield, who represents New Haven’s Newhallville and East Rock neighborhoods, was standing in the hallway of the Legislative Office Building in Hartford Tuesday as a new three-month legislative session got under way.

He was digesting a wish list from New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. detailing the city’s top priorities for gettings laws passed at the Capitol in the session.

The list identifies 21 priorities in five categories. Many are specific funding requests, while others call for broader changes to state law. New Haven tate Reps. Holder-Winfield and Roland Lemar and Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney were asked about the merits, and likelihood, of the various proposals. Lemar agreed to rank the bills into four categories: Dead on Arrival, Unlikely, Possible, and Slam Dunk. Read some highlights below.

Red Light Cameras

At the top of the mayor’s 2012 list is a red light camera bill, which the city and its delegation have been fighting for for years. The bill would allow a municipality to use cameras to catch red-light runners. It has been defeated year after year, in part due to privacy concerns from groups like the ACLU.

The bill to be proposed this year would allow cities with 60,000 or more people to experiment with the cameras.

Lemar’s prognosis: “Possible.”

Lemar said he met Thursday with a small group of people on both sides to “work through” some of the concerns. The transportation committee will introduce the bill, and Lemar is optimistic that the fears can be allayed. The bill has to go through three committees—transportation, judiciary, and planning and development.

Holder-Winfield: “It’s got a much better shot than it has in the past.” It’s become an “urban” bill shared by several cities—and Gov. Dannel Malloy—instead of just a New Haven bill. “I don’t like” the bill because New Haven needs to change a whole culture of lawless driving, not just install cameras, “but I’ll vote for it.”

Looney: “a reasonable possibility.” “Some of the objections have been satisfactorily handled.” For example, those caught on camera would get a ticket instead of having to appear in court. And this year, Senate Democrats propose lowering the fine, because some critics argued the fee should be lower if a driver is caught by a camera versus caught by a police officer. “I agree with that.” The new proposal would drop the fine from $125 to $75.

Looney said some critics dismiss the bill as a sly way for cities to drum up extra revenue, but “our focus is it’s really about public safety.” Municipalities would be required to put signs up alerting people to the cameras, so if drivers heed the warnings, the new law would have “diminishing returns” in revenue.

School Construction

DeStefano proposes changing the formula for state-funded school construction projects so that the state pays not only for construction but also for 20 years of maintenance on the buildings. In a briefing earlier this week, schools Chief Operating Officer Will Clark said the district has been underfunding its maintenance budget. An outside auditor recommended paying $29.5 million per year, whereas the district is only allocating $17.6 million.

In a memo introducing the concept, the city wrote that many of the new schools had to be built because “maintenance had been deferred or neglected at previous buildings. With tight budgets it is essential to protect these investments by adhering to a preventative maintenance schedule.”

Lemar’s prediction: “Unlikely.”

“It’s a reasonable request,” however, he said.. “The state’s investing in these buildings, and in order to protect our investment, we should make sure the cities have the money to properly maintain them.”

Holder-Winfield: “You’ve got a hard way to go with that one. Right now I don’t see how you do that.” Budgets may be tight for cities—but they’re tight for the state, too.

Looney: “It’s a new ask, and obviously it will be evaluated and looked at.” There are arguments on both sides. One one hand, note that the state already paid New Haven $1.2 billion for its schools—over 80 percent of construction costs. “On the other side, a huge state investment is involved. Some would say—should the state take on the funding because the city’s not capable?”

Union Station

The state has long planned to build a second garage at Union Station to alleviate a parking crunch. However, construction isn’t set to begin until 2013, and no money has been identified, according to the city. Even though the state has been promising to build it since the days of the Rowland Administration The city does not support a parking-only solution, and instead has pushed for a “transit-oriented development” that would incorporate other uses, such as offices and stores. DeStefano wants the state to authorize such a development as a “public-private partnership project” so the state can work with a private developer to make the development happen.

Holder-Winfield: Unlikely to pass this session if it has a pricetag. “If you want to talk about money, talk about it in the session where we’re building the budget.” The state passed a biennial budget last year; this year is meant only for adjustments to that budget.

Lemar: “Possible.” It wouldn’t cost anything this session. There needs to be “a rational development around Union Station that’s transit-oriented, and multi-use. No one wants just a parking garage there,” which has been what the state has promoted.

Looney: “The terms and conditions have to be negotiated first before you can put it on a list” or in a bill. The city is still negotiating with the state over the terms of the development. “The [Department of Transportation] is certainly interested in getting that resolved. “Parking is a great need there,” and it deters people from taking the train.

Looney said the project is no longer tied to a redevelopment of Church Street South, because plans there are taking longer than expected.

Youth At Work

The city gets $300,000, or 9 percent, of a $3.5 million statewide grant to pay for its Youth@ Work teen summer jobs program. Federal stimulus money that funded the program dried up. The city’s asking the state to boost the amount of money allocated by the Department of Labor.

Lemar: “Somewhere between unlikely and possible.” The initiative is “a huge priority” for cities across the state.

Holder-Winfield: “How could you possibly be against it? Of course I’m for it. The problem is, how much is it?”

Community Center

The city is asking for a $250,000 planning grant to look into creating a community center at the abandoned Goffe Street amory, the Q House or another space. The grant would pay for an environmental review of the armory site and to “begin schematic plans for a new facility.”

Lemar: “Possible.” “There’s got to be a lot of buy-in from the state.” The proposal “fits onto the mayor’s agenda, the Board of Aldermen’s agenda, and delegation’s agenda.” Lemar got a request from Alderwoman Jackie James, president pro tempore of the board, to boost the grant to a half-million dollars. It might be possible to “unlock money” from the Department of Economic and Community Development for the grant.

Holder-Winfield: “How much are we up to now?” Asking for extra money in a short session year is difficult. The state is already struggling to stay under a spending cap. In such tough budget times, “it makes perfect sense that [a proposal like this] might not happen.”

Vo-Tech High School

The city is asking for a $750,000 planning grant for a partnership with Gateway Community College to launch a vocational technical high school at Gateway’s soon-to-be-abandoned campus on Long Wharf.

Lemar: “Possible.” It’s “an exciting” initiative. The governor set vo-tech education as a focus during this session, which focuses on education reform. However, a $750,000 grant “is going to be tough this cycle,” because there are no new dollars. The proposed Gateway collaboration was not among three three vo-tech programs the governor has targeted for expansion this year. The project fits with the state’s priorities, but in a short session, “it’s a difficult ask.”

Holder-Winfield: “The problem, again, is the money.” However, even if the money isn’t available, “we probably should be pushing it even just to talk about it.”

Pre-School Funding

“While the State has begun to raise the bar to require higher standards for pre-school educators, funding for our Early Childhood programs has not increased to help to attract and maintain this more highly educated workforce,” reads the city’s narrative. The city is asking for an unspecified amount of extra funding to “adequately compensate” pre-school teachers, “enabling the recruitment and retention of a more talented workforce.”

Lemar: Increasing pre-school funding, more broadly, is “the closest thing I feel we’ve got to a slam dunk, because everybody seems to be on board.” Gov. Malloy has made pre-school a focus of his education reform goals. Malloy called for funding 500 extra seats across the state for priority school districts like New Haven. New Haven could use the extra seats—though the city strives to offer universal pre-K, “I don’t think we have a universal pre-K. It’s not true.” Too many parents are denied pre-K seats by income requirements or confusing lotteries.

Holder-Winfield: “It’s going to be tough.” You can’t just talk about funding for New Haven; any solution has to be state-wide.

Early Literacy

The city’s asking the state to restore cuts to an Early Reading Success program that occurred when stimulus money dried up, and increase overall funding for the program. The program offers small-group tutoring for kids who struggled in reading.

Holder-Winfield: “I’m supportive of the concept,” but the system needs broader reforms.

Holder-Winfield has taken leadership on this issue: Last session, he pushed through a bill that allowed five districts to stop measuring reading with the traditional DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) to what he called a more useful tool. He called for using that tool to test third-graders’ reading, require schools to offer interventions and summer school for struggling readers, and to make sure teachers are qualified to teach reading.

“Cities Should Be Very Grateful”

Overall, Lemar called the agenda “ambitious,” with a lot of good ideas.

Holder-Winfield said there’s a decent chance for a handful of proposals to pass, the most promising of which is red light cameras.

“From there on, you’re hurting me,” Holder-Winfield said. “It’s funding, funding, funding—that’s it.” He said the state already worked hard to hold cities harmless last session.

Lemar noted that “in addition to the City ‘s 2012 legislative agenda, the Board of Aldermen’s agenda and individual constituent agendas,” state legislators have their work cut out for them playing defense. “The city also needs us to protect the massive New Haven grants and programs already in existence that are the targets of other legislators across the state; attempting to replenish the tremendous cuts that the governor has recommended to our non-profit and arts communities; improving state processes and programs to foster more job growth,” not to mention school reform and taking another swing at repealing the death penalty.

Looney said that in a three-month session, there’s a huge time crunch for passing new bills. In an interview in his office, he declined to rate the likelihood of specific points on DeStefano’s agenda. As for requests with price tags, “We deal with it on a case-by-case basis as we go along.”

The powerful Appropriations Committee, which holds the purse strings, is ruled by two New Haven legislators, Toni Walker and Toni Harp. They were tied up in budget hearings for most of Thursday and could not be reached for comment.

Looney said New Haven will likely benefit from a range of education reform proposals, including an extra $3.8 million in education cost sharing money (about half of which is going to charter schools). And New Haveners will benefit from some items passed last session—including a statewide Earned Income Tax Credit, which gives money to the working poor. Ten thousand families in New Haven alone qualify for EITC, which means there should be “a huge surge of new revenue coming into families in the city” in the next few months.

Looney said in the upcoming session, he aims to expand a jobs bill passed in October. Under the STEP Up program, the state will now pay part of the salaries for new employees at businesses with fewer than 50 employees. Looney said this session, he aims to expand the program to include businesses with up to 100 workers.

Last year, Looney noted, Connecticut was one of just a few states that didn’t cut municipal aid. “We preserved major grant programs to municipalities intact,” he said. “The cities should be very grateful for that fact.”

A diverse group of stakeholders in this year’s education debate got together Tuesday and laid out their own agenda for education reform. Some of the proposals are similar to what Gov. Dannel P. Malloy proposed last week during his budget address, while others take a slightly different approach.

The Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents, Connecticut Association of Schools, Connecticut Association of Boards of Education, Connecticut Business and Industry Association, Connecticut Council for Education Reform, and the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now gathered at a Capitol press conference to talk about their shared goals.

“We think it is high time we really start addressing that not every child in this state gets the educational program or achieves at the level they need to achieve for us to be satisfied with the results that they get,” Joseph Cirasuolo, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public Schools Superintendents, said.

Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield of New Haven, who watched the press conference from the back of the room said he’s just happy everyone is talking about education.

“It’s an important conversation about education reform and it needs to be repeated, over, and over again,” he said. “We need to have people thinking about these issues.”

He said he sees the coalition as a good thing because it means the conversation is continuing. He did not comment on specifically on any of the proposals.

Rae Ann Knopf, executive director of the Connecticut Council for Education Reform, said that while the groups are not in agreement on everything, they do agree to support teachers, principals, and superintendents.

Knopf warned the media against trying to pick apart any of the proposals the group agreed upon. She opined that the proposals could not be picked apart because each is dependent on the other.

The group’s agenda is not a “blanket endorsement” of everything Malloy proposed last week, but Patrick Riccards, CEO of ConnCAN, said the coalition agrees on far more than it disagrees.

The coalition’s agenda includes support for teacher and principal evaluations and school district accountability, but it also seeks to change binding arbitration.

Cirasuolo said when a teacher contract goes to binding arbitration, arbiters have guidelines they used in order to determine whose last best offer to grant.

“Right now there is very little, if anything in those criteria, that talks about what students need,” he said. “So our specific proposal is: the primary factor used by the arbitration panel in deciding which last best offer to grant is which one best meets the learning needs of the students.”

He said that will change the culture of those negotiations as they move forward. But binding arbitration will be a tough sell to the legislature’s Democratic majority, who have been reluctant to change binding arbitration for any public employee group.

Eric Bailey, a spokesman for AFT Connecticut, said he doesn’t understand how increasing a co-pay for teacher health insurance, which is one of the items sometimes discussed in arbitration, has any impact on student achievement.

“We think what they’re really saying is they want to get rid of binding arbitration,” Bailey said.

Can the teacher unions find common ground with these groups?

“Sure, in an ideal world that would be ideal,” Bailey said. “But this isn’t an ideal world.”

He said there’s stuff in Malloy’s proposal that each of the groups, including the teacher unions, don’t agree with. He said the unions will go testify and talk to legislators, like they do every session.

Cirasuolo said he’s very open to having conversations with the two teacher unions, “but we’re not going to sacrifice what needs to be done just for the sake of finding common ground.”

As New Haven moves to connect local people to local work, developers will either put “skin in the game” or face demands that will make them flee town—depending whom you ask.

That debate arises now that labor-backed aldermen have voted to have the city form a “jobs pipeline” to link unemployed New Haveners to jobs in town, at a time of 11.7 percent unemployment in the city. They’ve given a working group 90 days to draw up a detailed plan for that pipeline. Some of the aldermen have specifically proposed requiring developers like Carter Winstanley to guarantee hiring specific numbers of New Haven people in return for receiving government help.

Mayor John DeStefano has embraced the “jobs pipeline” idea too but argues it makes no sense to put such requirements on developers—especially since they build the real estate but don’t occupy the buildings or hire the permanent workers.

Who’s right? Should the city create a “jobs pipeline”? If so, how should it work? And what’s the best way to engage business?

Three guest Independent “Pundit Dream Team” members—New Haven State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, Local 34 (Yale clerical & technical workers) union President Laurie Kennington, and Business New Haven/ New Haven magazine publisher Mitchell Young—addressed the questions with each other over half an hour on a live Google doc. The results follow:

Mitch Young: I’m very sympathetic to folks that see a billion dollars spent on promoting the “egghead ” economy, but they have no access to a job, decent or otherwise. Unfortunately this is just a continuation of the Plantation Economy that some would build in New Haven.

The business community started the discussion of education reform in our newspaper in 1994. The first reaction was to call them racists; I was called a racist myself by high-ranking government officials for calling for reform.

We [Business New Haven] have steadfastly been against almost every government proposal to fund businesses, with the exception of workforce development.

Laurie Kennington: One of the biggest problems with existing programs is that people are being trained based on the skills employers say they need, but when people are job-ready, employers still aren’t hiring them. It only makes sense to ask employers to put skin in the game so that all stakeholders have a shared interest in the program’s success.

Gary Holder-Winfield: The concept of a jobs pipeline makes a lot of sense to me. If it is that people are really in a pipeline—meaning training and matching up to jobs for which they are then qualified—I am for that.

Mitch Young: I have talked to hundreds of business people over the years, about education, job creation, government programs. I can’t tell you how many don’t even want to take an SBA [Small Business Administration] loan because they don’t want involvement from another entity telling them what to do. If we’re talking about the major developers—Yale, they did great in bringing a diverse workforce to their job sites. They, and frankly Mayor DeStefano, were the ones that pushed the unions and the employers to change the makeup of the construction workforce. They did a great job compared to what it was in the ‘70s.

Is This A Stick-Up?

Mitch Young: Let’s be clear—some folks claiming to be the “community” essentially demanded jobs from one of the best companies in New Haven, a company that is working harder than any I know for the betterment of New Haven, Higher One. In fact we just declared them our Corporate Citizen of the Year. I don’t know of another company that is on their scale that would make the effort to be in New Haven and Science Park that they made. To focus on what it took to put them there is completely self-destructive.

Gary Holder-Winfield: Mitch, whether one agrees with the tactics and who was focused on, the people you are referring to are a part of the community and reflect the sentiment of many within the community.

Mitch Young: As I said, I think they should be frustrated with the trickle-down thinking being deployed by some. The solution is not to keep independent business people from coming to New Haven.

Gary Holder-Winfield: I don’t think they see it as such. And perhaps some would see it as creating an atmosphere that is not conducive to courting business, but the people in the community are looking for the businesses to be what they would describe as better partners. That can be quibbled with of course, but that is what it is.

Laurie Kennington:The resolution that the Board of Aldermen presented doesn’t make specific recommendations about specific developers. The plan that I support is to bring all key players to the table to make this work. Mitch, do you think it makes sense to try to start this discussion and get buy-in from everyone involved?

Mitch Young: The discussion that needs to be is whether we need to look beyond the “egg head” economy and the trickle-down thinking. We just challenged [State Rep.] Brendan Sharkey about his position to not rebuild an agriculture committee. Why we see it as important, it represents a route to jobs for people today, not 20 years from now. We see more food manufacturers, like Chabasso, being born out of a revitalized ag sector. Governor Malloy said think big; we agree.

The first thing we should do is examine the bus routes to the suburbs and see if they are efficient in getting people to existing jobs.

Laurie Kennington:I agree it makes sense to have as diverse an economy as possible, but given where New Haven’s growth is happening now, doesn’t it make sense to figure out how to connect residents to the new jobs?
Gary Holder-Winfield: Laurie is on point about bringing everyone to the table. That is how a real jobs funnel works. It isn’t done by force.

Laurie Kennington:In our union, we know that “Eds and Meds” [education, higher-ed, medical, and biomedical] jobs are attainable. It doesn’t take 20 years to train people to do a lot of the work to support biotech and medical research.

Gary Holder-Winfield: Examination of transportation infrastructure is necessarily a part of this discussion and not always what is brought up. We are taking about dense communities with people who rely disproportionately on public transportation. If the system in place doesn’t work then we have a major issue whatever we do with a jobs funnels

Who Lost Biotech?

Mitch Young: We were the first to write about biotech in 1994. A billion of dollars of private investment later, I think we have two or three viable non-research companies. Neither is in New Haven. We lost our major pharmaceutical company; this is not where to focus for the community. Higher One did not come out of any public help, smart kids built a company. I’m not sure they have one customer in Connecticut yet, and they sell to colleges, keeping them in New Haven—amazing.

Laurie Kennington: One reason we have lost biotech companies is that we don’t have trained workers here. We need a robust pipeline that is attuned to the needs of employers. Let’s dig in and figure out how. I believe that we are lucky because a lot of the major employers here have a long-term interest in the health of this community. That creates an opportunity for this kind of thinking.

Mitch Young: This is not why the companies were lost. Every biotech executive I’v e talked to has said they get the key people from wherever around the world; they are science companies. We lost Bayer, because the attacks on pharmaceutical companies caused a bunch of mergers. It is not a workforce issue. What we should be concerned about is the coming crushing shrinkage of hospital jobs that will come to the Northeast.

Laurie Kennington: Just to clarify, I mean that we have lost biotech start-ups when they are transitioning from R&D [research and development] to manufacturing. Let’s talk about industries that are already here instead of speculating about the economy we would like to have. There is economic growth in New Haven; it just doesn’t currently match the skills of people who need jobs.

Mitch Young: I have fought this battle in New Haven for 17 years. One billion for the egghead economy, almost nothing for the rest. That is one company in Connecticut, Alexion, nobody else has gotten that far.

Laurie Kennington: Clearly, the government is committed to this question. Regionally, $12 million was spent on workforce training, but only half of adult participants secured jobs, and those jobs earned an average of $11,500. How can we spend this money effectively?

These are tough economic times, but parts of New Haven had disproportionately high unemployment prior to the crisis. History has shown us that moments of crisis are also great moments of opportunity. Now is our chance to put programs in place to make structural changes. We have a unique moment now because many key players: government, employers, labor, community leaders are interested in figuring out solutions.

Gary Holder-Winfield: This conversation focused understandably on bioscience. The issue is the jobs pipeline, which is broader than that. The issue is what is meant by it and whether as Laurie asks the players will be sitting around a table to make it work. I for one hope they do because it is one prong in dealing with the issue we have in our city.

Mitch Young: It’s not about programs, it’s about an environment that supports business development. New rules will just send businesses to the next town. Focus on adult education. New Haven needs to go beyond this idea of training to a community of people who are committed to success; that’s not what this program is.

Gary Holder-Winfield: Programs have an effect on environment.

Laurie Kennington: I agree with Mitch that past programs have not succeeded. We don’t need more of that! and we should be a place where business wants to come. Let’s do that by a NEW strategy that prepares residents to be ready to meet business needs.

HARTFORD — Money is tight and the problems huge, but Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has educators facing the upcoming legislative session with a mix of anxiety and excitement that 2012 will be the year that education reform gets a big boost.

“If we don’t do it this year, we will have missed a huge opportunity,” said Jennifer Alexander, vice president of research and partnerships for ConnCAN, one of the many advocacy groups weighing in on the issue.

Wealthy Connecticut, a state of haves and have-nots, has the distinction of posting the worst educational achievement gap in the nation.

Education funding priorities, teacher evaluation, tenure and early childhood programs, are all seen through the prism of shedding this embarrassing distinction.

“This is an issue of civil rights, of human rights. We can’t afford to give up on 40 to 60 percent of the young people living in some of our urban areas. It is morally repugnant to do that,” Malloy said in a recent interview on WNPR’s “Where We Live” with John Dankosky.

Beyond that, state Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, speaking at a panel on school choice hosted by the Connecticut Policy Institute, said it’s a matter of economic growth and survival for the state.

“In eight years, this is your work force,” Holder-Winfield said.

A timely agreement, that will put a positive spin on the upcoming session, is a teacher evaluation model that the disparate stakeholders, under the guidance of a facilitator and Stefan Pryor, the new education commissioner, reached consensus on late last month.

Malloy has slowly been releasing aspects of his legislative agenda with details out on early childhood education, a proposal to cut bureaucratic red tape for districts, direction for vocational schools and a more controversial one on new proposed certification rules.

Both the early childhood initiatives and one to help some 29 low-performing districts are needed to rectify the state’s continuing failure to qualify for federal Race to the Top funds and to obtain a waiver for No Child Left Behind mandates that call for all students to be proficient in math and reading by 2014.

Still to be announced is the big one on funding sources to help the poorest districts improve, as well as expansion of “high-quality school models,” which includes charters and magnets, in addition to traditional schools. His proposals so far are incremental steps towards reform that have generally been well received.

Malloy has proposed using $4 million to fund 500 open spaces in public and private pre-schools for children from the lowest performing schools. In 2010-11, an estimated 6,400 children, or 16 percent, out of some 40,000, entered kindergarten without a preschool experience.

Those percentages in poor schools are much higher however, with only 17 percent of students in Ansonia having the benefit of pre-school and only 22 percent in New Haven in the last school year, according to state figures.

The value of early childhood education has been validated in many studies, including in Connecticut. State Rep. Andrew Fleischman, D-West Hartford, co-chair of the Education Committee, said a Capitol Regional Education Council study found there was no achievement gap by third-grade for children who attended pre-school starting at age three.

“That speaks volumes,” Fleischman said.

Malloy wants to spend another $3 million on professional development for early childhood teachers and $5 million for a statewide quality rating system for the programs. Connecticut Voices for Children and the U.S. Department of Education found the current programs are disjointed, lack funding and need more data to monitor their effectiveness.

The state now invests $224.6 million in early childhood education, with $100 million sent to Care 4 Kids, which covers day care for some 21,000 kids monthly in home settings so their parents can go to work, but they have no educational component. These providers could also tap into the training funds.

The proposed evaluation changes are expected to be adopted at the state Board of Education meeting on Feb. 10.

“This is a very progressive plan for Connecticut,” said Diane Ullman, Simsbury’s superintendent of schools and a member of the panel charged with studying evaluation. She credited that to the “sense of urgency” that Pryor brought to the issue.

The evaluation ties 45 percent to student learning indicators with one-half of that reflecting state tests; 40 percent to observation of teacher performance and practices; 10 percent to parent and peer reviews and 5 percent to school-wide success or student feedback.
How it will be affect tenure remains to be seen, but one of the six principles Malloy announced for education reform is “working within a fair system that values skill and effectiveness over seniority and tenure” when it comes to identifying the best teachers.

“Teachers are looking forward to meaningful reform” said Mary Loftus Levine, executive director of the Connecticut Education Association, which has more than 43,000 members. “I’m optimistic about this session. I have never seen so much energy focused on public education in this state.”

She wants a yearly evaluation of teachers and has proposed a shorter timeframe – 85 days rather than 120 days – to dismiss an underperforming teacher, if after training and help, they fail to improve.

Levine wants to see changes in statute, not just guidelines. “We need fidelity to the process … that will ensure that the systems are actually followed.”

Levine still favors tenure after four years of teaching and like state Holder-Winfield, feels the bigger issue is the evaluation process itself. The Connecticut Association of School Superintendents however, has proposed dropping tenure and replacing it with 5-year contracts.

Malloy’s proposal to streamline certification and reciprocity with other states is getting pushback from the teacher unions. He proposes three steps instead of five with a new master teacher category and continuing certification tied to performance and not academic courses.

“The certification process is complex and we are concerned that over-simplifying it and having different local standards, would weaken the standards for becoming certified and maintaining certification,” Nancy Andrews, spokewoman for the CEA said in a statement. Levine worried the move could actually lower standards.

Patrick Riccards, CEO of ConnCAN, a non-profit advocating major educational reforms, disagrees. “This will strengthen the teaching profession,” he said.

Another of the tenets broadly describing his legislative agenda is targeting more resources “to districts with the greatest need – provided that they embrace key reforms that position students for success.”

For state Sen. Toni Harp, D-New Haven, longtime co-chair of the Appropriations Committee and chair of a task force on closing the achievement gap, the underlying message is accountability.

“It’s more than just money,” Harp said of the resources needed by 29 low-performing districts. She wants the state Board of Education to take an active role, using best practices, analyzing what the districts are doing, and if they continue to fail to show progress, concrete consequences.

“When you have accountability, you begin to reach your goals,” Harp said.

The same point was made by Ted Sergei, one-time education commissioner, who along with Harp, is a member of a task force looking to update date the Education Cost Sharing grant, that this year will distribute $1.9 billion to the schools, an amount that is some $800 million short of full funding.

Sergei wants better accounting of all the funds that go to education, from every source.

Malloy also said he wants to unleash “innovation by removing red tape and other barriers to success, especially in high-performing schools and districts.”

Riccards said from his experience, trimming bureaucratic mandates can be worth more than money.

Pryor has already promised to cut the 35 data forms superintendents have to file by 30 percent and Malloy will appoint a task force to study regulations and mandates that should be eliminated and report back on them before the 2013 legislative session.

The ECS grant is the largest piece of the $3.7 billion that will be spent on public education in 2011-2012. The task force reviewing the formula punted on all the difficult decisions until its report is due in October with any changes not effective until fiscal 2014, at the earliest.

The three-decade old grant is widely viewed as broken, having been manipulated over that timeframe to hold towns harmless, rather than allowing any to lose funds.

Given the continuing pressures on the state budget, which will be subject to cuts over the next six months to end up in the black, more money for education will likely mean a shift from other non-education areas or finding new pots of money.

“That is going to be the real challenge,” said state Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney, D-New Haven, but taking money from richer school districts and distributing it to under-performing schools is not in the cards

“Politically, it’s a non-starter,” Looney said as municipalities plan their budgets for next year based on what has already been promised in the state’s biennial budget.

Potential areas for revenue include the Sunday sale of liquor and elimination of non-performing tax credits, but they are projected to either generate small revenue streams or present a tough approval path.

Malloy has said he will “bend” the ECS formula to find the funds for the low performing districts.

The $20.1 billion biennial budget was always tight, but the latest revenue estimates wiped out a small projected surplus with Malloy ordering $73.6 million in cuts to finish fiscal 2012 fiscal year with the books balanced.

As part of his six education principles, Malloy said he is ready to “authorize the intensive interventions and enable the supports necessary to turn around Connecticut’s lowest-performing schools and districts.”

The biggest intervention so far has been the Windham school system, which has been taken over by the state Board of Education, who hired Steven Adamowski, former superintendent of schools in Hartford, as a special master to run the system.

Adamowski aggressively overhauled the Hartford system and introduced or reworked 29 choice programs there in the past five years.

“There are not enough good choices and parents are frustrated. There is no one model – one particular size that fits all,” Adamowski said at the Connecticut Policy Institute forum.

Adamowski would like to see more national school models in Connecticut, particularly STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) schools grades 4-8. “Connecticut is an innovative wasteland,” he said.

“In order to flourish you need a critical mass. It is one of the key areas where we are behind,” he said.

Holder-Winfield sees choice as part of school reform. He would also put school vouchers on the table.

“Nothing should be taboo. You create bad policy when you limit discussion,” Holder-Winfield said.

The administration does not support the use of vouchers, but Malloy has included expanding “high-quality school models,” including traditional schools, magnets and charters as one of his goals.

ConnCAN has consistently lobbied for incorporating all public schools, including schools of choice, into the ECS formula. Now different districts have different state funding levels per student with less money for public charter and vocational-agricultural schools.

“It’s a 30-year-old formula that has not directed funds where kids are attending schools,” Riccards said.

He realizes that the state does not now have the money to boost spending, but he is heartened by statements from state Sen. Andrea Stillman, D-Watertown, co-chair of the Education Committee, that the Connecticut needs to treat all public schools equitably.

“It’s a promising sign,” Riccards said.

In the meantime, he said there should be a “common charter of accounts,” which would provide consistent definitions on staffing so all schools “account for spending in the same way.”

The Connecticut Conference of Mayors wants the ECS formula fixed sooner, rather later, with more funds added when the economy improves.

Malloy has also proposed taking the 20 vocational-technical schools away from state Board of Education control, setting high standards for its courses that would be tied to labor market needs.

Photo by Allan Appel

A hearse traveling through East Rock had no body inside—but 125 shouting bodies accompanying it.

The occasion Sunday morning was the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Love March, organized for the 42nd year by Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church on Lawrence Street in East Rock’s Goatville section.

The hearse offered a fresh opportunity to seek meaning in the late civil rights leader’s legacy in the context of today’s challenges for people in New Haven.

As Pastor Kennedy Hampton Sr. (son of march founder George Hampton) led the stalwart crowd in putting on hats snugly and singing spirituals as they paraded out into the cold to celebrate Dr. King’s legacy, he said it is not unusual to have a symbol in the entourage.

He recalled that the parade in the past has had a mule, symbolizing the poor; and more recently a bus that symbolized the famous incident with Rosa Parks that triggered the Montgomery bus boycott early in the civil rights movement.

So why an empty hearse in New Haven in 2012?

Hampton said the hearse marked the 34 homicides that occurred in New Haven in 2011 as well as the violence that occurs daily all over the world.

“The emptiness of the hearse is important. It’s a reminder not to put anyone else in it in 2012,” Hampton said.

Among the verses he led his congregants and marchers in: “We Shall Overcome .. (black and white together) ...” “Don’t wait for a hearse to carry you to church.” And “Lay down your guns, not our sons.”
In a stem-winder of an address to the congregation, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro said called the empty hearse “a sobering reminder of unfinished work.”

In particular she charged the young people in the audience to fight against current assaults on voting rights. And she called on everyone to do more, including elected representatives like herself, to fight hunger, unemployment and poverty.

After she paraphrased King’s remark that a sign of maturity is the ability to engage in self-criticism, DeLauro sat down to a standing ovation.

New Haven state Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield drilled down deepest in exploring how an empty hearse might relate to the King legacy.

And how that might specifically affect the lives of young people in New Haven.

“Dr. King talked about invisibility,” Holder Winfield said. He invoked the relevance of Ralph Ellison’s iconic 1953 novel Invisible Man. “Some of the most invisible people are young blacks,” he said. “That’s because we project on them negative tropes of young blackness.”

Those include stereotypes about young blacks being criminals, uninterested in success.
Holder-Winfield said that many young black men are “invisible” even to the older black people in their own communities.

“Getting away from invisibility” is an important part of the King dream, he said.

“Neighbors walking together, rediscovering each other”—that’s what Holder-Winfield said the empty hearse and the King legacy meant to him.

State Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney bent against an icy wind as he and an entourage of politicians both local and statewide made what has become an almost required political visit to participate in Shiloh’s rousing annual Love March and church service. Among others in attendance were Mayor John DeStefano, state Sen. Toni Harp, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, State Comptroller Kevin Lembo, Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, and U.S. Senate candidate Chris Murphy, attending for his first time.

After the parade made a large rectangle from Lawrence down Whitney to Edwards, then up State and back to the Shiloh sanctuary, there were gospel songs in praise of Jesus, punctuated by moments of individuals inspired to dance and sing on their own.

“You got a prayer,” called out Hampton, “get it out!”

With a new Democratic governor, 2011 seemed like the year the legislature would repeal Connecticut’s death penalty, until the sole survivor of a triple homicide appealed to lawmakers to wait. On Thursday a state senator said the wait may be over.

Sen. Edward Meyer, D-Guilford, said he will be sponsoring a prospective bill to repeal death penalty this legislative session. Three years ago the legislature passed a similar measure, but former Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed it.

Meyer said he’s confident enough votes exist in the House to pass the bill this year. However, it’s still unclear whether there are enough votes in the Senate. He said the issue will likely to come down to two Democrats—Senators Andrew Maynard and Edith Prague.

Last year Prague and Maynard, who had been supporters of the bill, retracted their support after meeting with Dr. William Petit, the sole survivor of a brutal 2007 triple-homicide at his Cheshire home.

Petit, his sister, and their lawyer urged the senators not to vote for the repeal, as it could have become impossible to get a death penalty sentence for the second man accused of murder in that case: Joshua Komisarjevsky.

Explaining her position, Prague grabbed headlines when she told CTNewsJunkie “They should bypass [Komisarjevsky’s] trial and take that second animal and hang him by his penis from a tree out in the middle of Main Street.”

Without their votes, there was not enough support in the Senate and the bill was never brought to the floor. But last month a jury in New Haven handed Komisarjevsky a death sentence, bringing the Cheshire case to an end.

Prague, who is recovering from a recent stroke, has indicated to Meyer that she would require some tailoring to the bill that almost passed last year. In order to gain her support, Meyer said the bill would have to include some provision that ensures anyone on death row would be held in solitary confinement for the duration of their life sentences.

Meyer said he has not yet spoken to Maynard, whose vote would also be necessary to clear the Senate chamber.

Reached by phone, Maynard said he has always been a supporter of repealing the death penalty but thought it would be impossible to have a rational discussion about it on the Senate floor when jury selection for the Komisarjevsky trial was all over the news.

“I know it may seem a little schizophrenic but I hope people can understand my issue was with the sort of inflammatory conditions at that time,” he said.

While he said he’s withholding his final judgement until he sees what ends up in the bill, Maynard said he supports the concept and thinks the repeal is likely to pass this year.

House Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero, a supporter of the death penalty, said he didn’t buy Maynard’s argument. If someone wants to have a debate about ending capital punishment, “you got to be able to do it in the face of a Petit type case,” he said.

It’s hard to respect a lawmaker’s position when the death penalty is appropriate in deplorable circumstances one year and should be abolished the next year, he said. He said the Cheshire case was a good example of why capital punishment should stay on the books.

“After hearing the evidence in the Petit trial, how someone could believe those two gentlemen should not be put to death is beyond my comprehension,” he said.

The renewed debate over the issue comes months after a Stanford professor released a study finding the application of Connecticut’s death penalty to be “not only arbitrary but is also impermissibly discriminatory.”

The study by Prof. John J. Donohue III evaluated the application of capital punishment by comparing all 4,686 murders that took place in the state between 1973 and 2007. Of those murders, 92 resulted in capital felony convictions and 29 went to a death penalty phase. Nine received the death sentence.

Overall, Donohue found that the application of the punishment was largely random and had more to do with factors like race and geography than the heinousness of the crime.

“I found that cases prosecutors charge as capital are virtually indistinguishable in these measures of deathworthiness from cases where prosecutors choose not to bring capital charges,” he wrote.

The study found that of the nine crimes that warranted the death penalty, only one of them was among the 15 most egregious crimes.

Donohue said the location of a crime seems to impact whether a trial will go to a death penalty phase. Someone who commits a murder in Waterbury is far more likely to be sentenced to die than elsewhere in the state.

Race also plays a role in who receives the punishment. A minority defendant who murders a white victim is three times as likely to get a death sentence than a white defendant, the study found.

Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield and Sen. Edith Prague

Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D- New Haven, has been pushing for a repeal of the death penalty for years. He said the Donohue’s conclusion that the punishment is racially unfair isn’t a new idea.

“We all know there’s a racial component to this,” he said.

Cafero said it’s wrong for the study to treat every single death penalty case the same—each case has its own circumstances. He argued that death row’s two most recent tenants, Komisarjevsky and his co-defendant Steven Hayes, are white and they are not the only white convicts to be sentenced to die in Connecticut.

Holder-Winfield said that’s not the point.

“Even if you believe everyone on death row is guilty, there is definitely inequality built into the system,” he said. “Nobody says there are no white guys on death row but if you’re black you’re more likely to get the death penalty.”

If people wanted to to try the death penalty in every single case where it would apply, Holder-Winfield said he would reconsider pushing for its abolition. He said he offered as much in 2009 but no one wanted to take him up on it.

After the prospect of a repeal dissolved last year, Holder-Winfield said he wasn’t planning to push the issue this year. He reasoned if he waited a few years the emotions generated by the high-profile Petit case may dissipate.

It’s also a tough issue to tackle especially in an election year, he said. But with other lawmakers like Meyer voicing concerns this year, Holder-Winfield said he’s ready to make the push again.

But he wasn’t ready to predict the bill’s success this year.

“I’ll be working the votes until it’s time to pass the bill,” he said. “If it hits the floor it will only be because we have the votes.”

He also wasn’t ready to count on Prague.

“Until I’ve heard her confirm it, I don’t put her in that category,” he said.

“The forum was very successful in that it brought together interested parties from business, government, non-profits and communities to have a real conversation about what Connecticut needs to do to improve its educational system and eliminate the achievement gap between whites and minorities,” Holder-Winfield said.

“The governor and Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor have elevated the issue beyond normal discussion to a top priority,” said Holder-Winfield, vice chairman of the Judiciary Committee and chairman of the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus.

“The discussions that took place illustrated that the different stakeholder parties have areas of common ground,” he said.

The forum included experts, school administrators, teachers and other stakeholders to share ideas on how the state can confront the need to return Connecticut to a position of preeminence in education.

The workshop will help shape education reform proposals Governor Malloy will introduce during the 2012 regular session of the General Assembly, which begins in February.

www.facebook.com/people/Gary-Holder-Winfield/754006741

Latino legislators called on Gov. Dannel P. Malloy Wednesday to support more aggressive enforcement of Connecticut's anti-profiling law in the wake of the federal findings of "serious civil rights violations" resulting from racial profiling of Latino motorists by East Haven police.

The governor, in a response released soon after legislators made the call, appeared to be listening. "The situation in East Haven could have been addressed more easily and with less effort on behalf of the (U.S.) Justice Department with proper collection and disclosure of motorist data by Connecticut law enforcement agencies," said state Rep. Kelvin Roldan, D-Hartford.

"Federal intervention should not have been necessary, but now it is time for state government to step up and meet its responsibilities for protecting the rights of our residents," said Roldan. He was joined in a Capitol press conference by more than 10 other Latino and black legislators, as well as state Rep. James Albis, D-East Haven, and several state Latino leaders.

They released a letter they delivered Tuesday to Malloy, asking him "for your unqualified support for aggressive enforcement" of the Alvin W. Penn Racial Profiling Prohibition Act, passed in 1999 through the efforts of the late state Sen. Alvin Penn, D-Bridgeport.

Police departments are required by the act, which prohibits racial profiling as the sole reason for stops, to report the race of all motorists subjected to traffic stops. But currently only 27 Connecticut departments are in compliance and there is little or no money set aside to enforce the act, officials said.

Malloy responded Wednesday to the letter by saying, "More than 10 years ago, as the mayor of Stamford, I was proud to stand with the men and women of the Stamford Police Department on Martin Luther King Day to announce that we did not tolerate racial profiling and would lead the efforts to ensure its elimination." "As governor, I will continue to insist that every effort is taken to protect individual rights in every community, and that racial profiling is eliminated," he said.

"It appears that, for the past five years, federal funding has been available to pay for racial identity data gathering and analysis," Malloy said in a statement. "Let me be clear: It is simply unacceptable that Connecticut law hasn't been followed," Malloy added. "To that end, I have directed my staff and the Department of Transportation to ensure police departments continue to collect, or begin to collect, this data and submit it to an appropriate outside evaluator for analysis and report."

Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, vice chairman of the legislature's Judiciary Committee and chairman of the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, praised Malloy for seeking stronger enforcement of Connecticut's racial profiling law.

The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division recently released a report that found the East Haven Police Department "engages in a pattern or practice of racial profiling," that Latinos were stopped at a rate far greater than their percentage of the population — and one officer had a stop rate of Latinos of 40.5 percent, Roldan said.

While East Haven may be the most public case — and the one facing federal action — the problem is not limited to one town, Roldan and other speakers said. When Roldan asked his colleagues who among them had ever been subjected to ethnic or racial profiling, three or four of the 10 legislators standing behind and alongside him raised their hands.

The African-American Affairs Commission's 2010 annual report listed 31 Connecticut communities as being in compliance at that time. They were: Ansonia, Cheshire, Hamden, Milford, New Haven, Trumbull, Naugatuck, Waterbury, Avon, Bloomfield, Bristol, Danbury, Greenwich, Middletown, New Canaan, Newington, New London, New Milford, Newtown, Norwalk, Plainville, Putnam, Ridgefield, Simsbury, Stamford, Stonington, Vernon, Watertown, Westport, Wethersfield and Wilton.

State Sen. Eric Coleman, D-Bloomfield, co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said that one way to improve enforcement of the law might be to make the state Office of Policy and Management the agency in charge of receiving data and ensuring compliance, rather than the current African-American Affairs Commission.

It's important to have an agency with proper staffing to ensure that police departments comply with the law, he said. The African-American Affairs Commission has been deeply affected by state budget cuts, said Coleman. Currently, the amount spent to ensure compliance with the law "is probably about zero. It's nominal or minimal, if anything at all," he said.

A bill that would have made some of those changes failed to pass during last year's legislative session, but "unfortunately, we are probably assisted by the unfortunate incidents that have taken place" both in East Haven and elsewhere in recent years, Coleman said. He also said there should be an advisory committee set up "that works with law enforcement" and is "composed of stakeholders, residents of the communities that seem to be most affected by racial profiling activities."

"This is not just a Latino issue. This is not a racial minorities issue," said state Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, who represents the district with the largest concentration of Latinos in the state.

When the act was first passed, some people asked, "Is this really necessary?" Fonfara said. "I think this (the East Haven situation) shows why this is really necessary. I don't think most people knew ... that this was happening in East Haven," and in its wake, one has to wonder "if this is happening elsewhere," he said.

Albis, who represents East Haven, said that "the allegations outlined in the DOJ report are certainly very serious and the town is not in an enviable position by any means. ... But my concern is about moving forward. ... It's very important for other communities across the state to identify such problems and to mitigate such problems before they blow up in our face," he said. "I stand here in full support of my colleagues."

Albis said later, "I can't imagine that it's a problem that's confined to just one town. ... There needs to be more enforcement."

“I applaud Governor Malloy for his zero-tolerance of racial profiling and emphatic call to protect people’s rights in all communities,” said Holder-Winfield.

“Legislators must now do their part and pass the bill that died during the last General Assembly session, which would correct issues in the Racial Profiling Prohibition Act championed by the late Sen. Alvin Penn, and incorporate suggestions made by activist David Samuels and the Community Party,” said Holder-Winfield, who is also chairman of the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus.

Legislators have asked Malloy to support funding for the law. Since enactment of the law in 1999, no money has been allocated for its enforcement, and police departments across the state have done little to meet its requirements. Only 27 departments have submitted the required profiling reports on a regular or consistent basis.

A press release issued by the administration said it appeared that for the past five years federal funding has been available to pay for racial identity data gathering and analysis.

“I cannot speak to the actions of the previous administration in allowing these funds to languish, but I can assure Connecticut residents that my Administration is committed to enforcing the laws on the books and has moved forward to get this data collected, reported, and evaluated,” Malloy said in the release.

“Let me be clear: it is simply unacceptable that Connecticut law hasn’t been followed. To that end, I have directed my staff and the Department of Transportation to ensure police departments continue to collect, or begin to collect, this data and submit it to an appropriate outside evaluator for analysis and report,” Malloy said.

Holder-Winfield is also a member of the Appropriations and Human Services committees.

www.facebook.com/people/Gary-Holder-Winfield/754006741

A new report on racial inequities in Connecticut's schools has local authorities renewing their call for systemic education reform.

"We're not even making the attempt to have conversations about race in education, independent of economics," said state Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven. "I'm happy to have this report out, because I want these conversations."

The report, "Equity in Education: A Transformational Approach," is a sweeping indictment of racial disparities in graduation rates, school discipline, achievement and placement in special education programs. The State Education Resource Center, a nonprofit organization supported by the Connecticut Department of Education, released the report Friday. The public can read it online at equity.ctserc.com.

In it, SERC says, "Connecticut's children remain highly segregated by race and income in its capital city, as well as across the state," 15 years after the landmark Sheff v. O'Neill case ordered Connecticut schools to correct racial gaps in education.

The SERC report contends that income alone "is not sufficient in explaining Connecticut's achievement gaps."

James E. Rawlings, president of the Greater New Haven branch of the NAACP, said the report's findings are no surprise.

"It's reality," Rawlings said. "I'm certainly aware of the issues we face in education. Schools are more polarized than ever before, and the solutions are not as straightforward as they should be. Underneath these stats is a great deal of misery."

The SERC report says African American students tend to be more severely disciplined than white students.

"The consequences for children of color tend to be more punitive, even for the same offenses, and the juvenile justice system makes it more difficult for children of color than for white children to reintegrate into their communities without further participation in the criminal justice system," according to the report.

As another sensationalist murder trial proceeded with blood in the air on Church Street, New Haven’s leading death penalty opponent predicted that Connecticut may finally be poised to abolish the practice of killing people.

New Haven State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield (pictured) made that prediction to a crowd of 100 people gathered in a church to talk about the death penalty and here from a New Haven woman who forgave her son’s murdered.

Holder-Winfield shocked the state in 2009 by convincing his fellow state legislators, in his first term, to vote to abolish the death penalty. nearly

“People, quite frankly, thought I was off my rocker,” he told the crowd during Tuesday’s night gathering at Christian Tabernacle Church on Newhall Street.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell ended up vetoing that bill amid the glare of the Petit family murders.

So Holder-Winfield waited until the next gubernatorial election. He helped elect an anti-death penalty governor, Gov. Dannel Malloy. But then, in 2011, some of Holder-Winfield’s colleagues who previously supported repeal ended up killing a new repeal bill—out of respect, they said, to the Petit family. At the time, the first of two trials of the accused killers in the Petit family case was taking place.

Holder-Winfield said Tuesday night that his side’s not giving up.

“We have the ability to keep people from killing. We don’t need to kill,” he said.

Pro-repeal forces have been doing more work in building public support than they did last time, he said, through events like Tuesday night’s. He said he believes the bill can pass in the upcoming session.

Later, Holder-Winfield clarified that in on off-budget year only committees can raise bills. “I believe if I can get the bill to the floor I can get it passed,” he said. “The Petit [case]‘s impact is hard to gauge. He has impact. Legislators pay attention to him. Having said that I still believe I can get it done.”

Holder-Winfield was among four panelists who spoke to and answered questions from the crowd. Also on the panel was Kim Davis, the sister of Troy Davis, whose execution in Georgia earlier this year sparked a national debate on the death penalty.

Davis’ sentence for killing a police officer 22 years ago was based on little physical evidence and on the testimony of witnesses who later recanted. He maintained his innocence up until his death. His sister still lives in Savannah, Georgia; she traveled to Connecticut this past weekend to participate in talks and discussions across the state.

The most moving moment of the night came when Victoria Coward spoke. Coward’s son, Tyler, was shot to death in Edgewood Park by Jose Fuentes Pillich in 2007. He was 18.

When Tyler’s killer was found, Coward confronted him face-to-face.

“I told him, ‘I forgive you,’” she said as members of the audience wiped their eyes. “And tears started to run down his face.”

Coward (pictured) said she doesn’t wish the death penalty on Pillich. (Pillich ended up getting 30 years in prison.) “Who I am to take somebody else’s life?” she asked. “Knowing that you took a life…that’s punishment right there.”

There was something for everyone to like in the jobs bill, but members of the Black and Puerto Rican caucus in the House weren’t exactly sure it would create jobs for their constituents.

The bill, which gives tax credits to companies and industries and provides job training programs, passed the House 147 to 1 Wednesday evening. The Senate voted 34 to 1.

“I want to support this bill in every way shape or fashion, but I want to support a bill that I know is going to help not just some people in Farmington, or some people in Avon, but I want to get a bill that’s going to address unemployment, and the low opportunities for employment in all neighborhoods in Connecticut,“ Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, said. “We can’t just advocate for one location, we have to advocate for all.”

Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield listens to the debate.

Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, and chair of the Black and Puerto Rican caucus, said the caucus met and decided it was going to be more vocal and clear with legislative leadership and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy about its concerns.

He said he thinks some of the legislation ignores the demographic shifts in urban areas where population is growing and the number of jobs is shrinking at alarming rates.

In Holder-Winfield’s white paper, which he sent to Malloy on Oct. 20 along with a letter, he explains that multiple reports have indicated that somewhere around the year 2020 the workforce age 25-29 will be half Black and Latino. 

“The state needs to deal with the fact it has some shifting demographics,” Holder-Winfield said.
He said once the state recognizes that it didn’t target this population soon enough, it will be too late to do anything about it.

“When we look at this bill it seems that we are focusing on one or two basic industries,” Walker said. “And we’re also focusing on corporations, much more than we are on the people who are working and the people who come support us at election time.”

The largest line item in the bill is $340 million for the Manufacturing Assistance Act program. It’s a program that allows manufacturers to invest pre-tax profits for a certain number of years in an investment account. That money is then reinvested in a company.

“I understand that as many have said here, we’re not here to buy jobs or pay for jobs, government’s here to assist business,” Walker said. “But if we are going to go about trying to subsidize employment for people that are in the middle class neighborhoods, who are unemployed, who have reached that maximum of unemployment, we’ve gotta make sure that we’re addressing them.”

Sen. Majority Leader Martin Looney, D-New Haven, said the Subsidized Training and Employment Program, or STEP, gives six months of job training to residents living at 250 percent of the federal poverty level, who have been unemployed for a certain period of time. He said that program, which is funded at $5 million per year for two years, targets urban residents. It also provides a subsidy to underemployed individuals or individuals looking to move up the manufacturing ladder.

But Walker said the $20 an hour they will make under the program isn’t enough to feed a family. She said that’s $35,000 to $40,000 a year. She said she has problems when the state is giving millions of forgivable loans to wealthy corporations and is garnishing the wages of welfare recipients as soon as they get a job.

“We want jobs. We don’t want soundbites,” Walker said.

Jim Horan, executive director of the Connecticut Association for Human Services, said Wednesday morning that he hopes the jobs legislation that received bipartisan support is the beginning of a conversation and not an end.

Between 1990 and 2010 Connecticut cities lost 90,000 jobs, nearly 20 percent, while the number of the jobs elsewhere in the state remained relatively constant.

Hartford alone lost 27 percent of its jobs since 1990. Horan said this means that there are fewer opportunities for Hartford residents.

Holder-Winfield sent Horan’s suggestions for improving urban employment, such as requiring a portion of infrastructure project jobs to go to urban residents, or creating small incubator space in urban areas, to Malloy along with his letter and a report from the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women.

The letter was sent on Oct. 20, but as of Wednesday afternoon Malloy said he had not seen it.
In an interview in his Capitol office Malloy said there was a lot of incentives to hire anybody in the legislation the House passed. He said the bill did not discriminate based on where a person lived.

He said the legislation also reorganizes educational training which is an important step in giving all Connecticut residents opportunities. He said the bill also moves three vo-tech schools and three community colleges into specific training for manufacturing.

“I’m having a hard time understanding what else we could do,” Malloy said. “We have support for manufacturing disproportionately manufacturing is in urban communities.”

He said if there’s issues that are missing they can be addressed in the regular session which convenes in February. He said the legislation passed Wednesday needed to be bipartisan in nature, which meant there were some behind-the-scenes compromises.

Holder-Winfield said it’s not uncommon for him to be told these types of issues will be dealt with in the future. He just hopes they can sit down and have a conversation about it soon.

He said leadership from the executive branch will go a long way. It’s not the first time Malloy has been approached by leaders in urban communities about the unemployment in cities.

A few weeks ago he met with religious leaders in Hartford’s North End to talk about their concerns, which were not much different than Holder-Winfield’s.

Legislative leadership on both the Democratic and Republican side of the aisle said they felt the assistance for small businesses goes a long way to addressing some of Holder-Winfield’s concerns.

“We’re trying to create jobs for every one here,” House Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero, R-Norwalk said. “The bill is mainly geared toward small business because of legislative leadership.”

Majority Leader Brendan Sharkey, D-Hamden, agreed. He said legislative leaders understand the desire to help out large corporations, but he believes the small business assistance will benefit urban communities too by helping out the job creators there.

Sen. Eric Coleman, D-Hartford, said it’s a good positive first step, but the state has to tackle the issue of the long-term unemployed in the future.

Lois Britton of West Haven is a grandmother who lives on a fixed income. She thinks Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s plan to spend what little federal money the state expects to receive for heating assistance is “ridiculous.”

Members of the legislature’s Appropriations, Energy and Technology, and Human Services Committee may not have used the same word, but they unanimously agreed to change the Malloy administration’s proposal after a five hour public hearing Tuesday.

Britton’s home is heated by gas, which means she would have been one of the nearly 70,000 residents who would not have received assistance under the original plan put forth by the Malloy administration.

Under Malloy’s plan, only about 36,000 low-income residents who use heating oil or propane to heat their homes would have received some of the estimated $46.4 million in federal heating assistance.

At the end of the day, the three legislative committees were more optimistic. The committee’s estimated that the federal government would give the state about $15.22 million more in funding, or the state will be responsible for finding the additional amount in its current budget. If the federal government decides to give the state more money then the committees will reconvene and decide how the money will be spent.

Ben Barnes, Malloy’s budget director, reasoned that households heated by electricity and natural gas are protected by a statutory moratorium on utility shut-offs during winter. However, he said the legislature’s decision to give about $255 to each household under the basic assistance portion of the program was “not unreasonable.” Under the governor’s plan utility heating customers would have received no funding to help pay their bills.

Although Barnes said was less optimistic than the legislature about how much money the federal government would end up giving the state.

“Last year the House was controlled by the Democrats, but this year we have fiscally conservative Republicans in charge,” Barnes said.

He said if the federal government fails to come through with the additional funds then he’s going to have lock people in a room and start talking about making drastic cuts to the current budget.

Rep. Peter Tercyak, co-chairman of the Human Services Committee, said Malloy’s plan in some ways discriminates against urban areas where low income residents are more likely to live in apartment buildings where the main sources of heat are gas or electricity.

“When was the last time you saw oil tanks in an apartment building?” Tercyak said. “This is skewed to homeowners and not renters.”

Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, said he’s concerned that if Malloy’s plan was adopted people that use gas and electricity for heat will be without heat next winter. He said when it’s May and it’s sunny out they’re not thinking about turning the gas back on, then suddenly they’re out of the system.

“That’s a problem,” Holder-Winfield said. “It would make me feel better if we were thinking about that.”
He said the issue seems to have brought lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle together.

Rep. Toni Walker, co-chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said the committee was listening to ideas from everybody and trying to get everybody some money no matter how they heat their home.

Rep. Vickie Nardello, co-chairwoman of the Energy and Technology Committee, said they recognize by adopting the legislature’s plan to spend $61.6 million is beyond the $46 million the president proposed. However, she said the U.S. Senate plan would send Connecticut $76 million. She said over the past 10 years the president’s proposal was never adopted.

The support to spend $61.6 million was also supported by the Republicans whose constituents benefit from the Contingency Heating Assistance Program.

James Gatling, president and CEO of New Opportunities and head of the Connecticut Community Action Association, said Malloy’s plan would be devastating for his clients.

“The reality is that the energy assistance is not just important, but essential to keeping struggling families safe and housed,” Gatling testified. “The more energy assistance funding is cut and its capacity diminished, the more the state limits families’ spending on other essential items such as food, health care, and housing.”

Rep. Holder-Winfield was vocal during the last legislative session about the importance of adding staff at the crime lab.

“The governor’s effort to increase staffing will go a long way toward making the citizens of this state safer by allowing the lab to review and process evidence in a more expedient manner,” he said.

Since 2005, the overall workload at the lab has increased by 25 percent, but the volume of DNA evidence testing has increased by 400 percent. Last year, Connecticut’s backlog ranked worst in the nation.

Referring to the backlog, Holder-Winfield said, “One of the first priorities of government is public safety and the governor has demonstrated once again that he has his eye on the ball. By reallocating resources, we achieve the goal of increased public safety while demonstrating that there is an understanding of the fiscal constraints faced by government.”

“I hope this legislation will help those who have suffered discrimination and give them the chance to live free from fear and intimidation,” said Holder-Winfield, who as vice chair of the Judiciary Committee led the fight for passage of the bill.

The bill, An Act Concerning Discrimination (HB 6599), prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression in employment, public accommodations, the sale or rental of housing, the granting of credit, and other laws over which the state Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities has jurisdiction.

“This legislation is long overdue,” Holder-Winfield said. “In its essence, it prohibits discrimination and offers people protections of their basic rights to use public accommodations.”

The bill defines “gender identity or expression” as a person's gender-related identity, appearance or behavior, whether that identity, appearance or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the person's physiology or sex at birth.

“People have been singled out for persecution and have even lost their jobs because they are simply different than many of us. Discrimination simply should not be tolerated,” Holder-Winfield said.

The bill makes it a class A misdemeanor to deprive someone of rights, privileges or immunities secured or protected by the state or federal laws or constitutions because of the person's gender identity or expression. This crime is punishable by imprisonment for up to one year, a fine of up to $2,000, or both.

HARTFORD — For the second time in two years, the Judiciary Committee has voted to repeal the death penalty with the historic bill given a good chance this time to be adopted by the General Assembly and signed by the governor.

The early vote by the committee, which held open the final tally until the conclusion of the meeting late Tuesday, was 27-17 in favor of abolition for those convicted of capital felony murder prospectively, that is in the future, after the bill goes into effect. The harshest punishment in Connecticut would be life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The final vote was not expected to change the outcome for the 45-member committee with the bill next going to the full House for a vote.

The fight to abolish the death penalty has been led by Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven.

“I think we have taken a first step towards repeal of the death penalty. The margin is a good indicator of where the legislature is headed. As the proponent of the bill, I hope that what we did tonight is a real predictor of what this body ultimately does,” Holder-Winfield said.

Sen. Eric Coleman, D-Bloomfield, the committee’s co-chairman, said aside from his own moral objections to executions, he voted for repeal because the law disproportionately affects minorities and the poor and is unevenly applied in the state.

Coleman added that repeal puts Connecticut in line with nations that outlawed it long ago, rather than repressive regimes that continue the practice.

No one has been executed in Connecticut in 50 years, with the exception of death row inmate, Michael Ross, who voluntarily waived his appeals. Several of the 10 men on death row have been there for more than two decades because of strong constitutional protections.

Sen. John Kissel, R-Enfield, led the fight to keep the death penalty on the books, arguing that there are good grounds to do so.

Kissel said he expects the repeal to easily pass in the House and, while it will be tight in the Senate, he predicted it will also pass there.

The vote was taken after less than two hours of respectful debate in the committee with much of it hashed out in earlier caucuses by the two parties.

While the bill applies going forward, there has been testimony that the courts will likely apply it to those already on death row to avoid having two classes of inmates convicted of the same crimes.

Sen. Edward Meyer, D-Guilford, said he has been wrestling with the issue since he went to law school and he wants the repeal beyond the practical reasons that it delays healing for the survivors, does not deter other murders and more than 100 people on death row nationwide have been exonerated in recent years.

He said he was ultimately convinced by a remark by former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who in reviewing death penalty cases, said: “‘No longer will I tinker with the mechanics of death.’”

Sixteen states have abolished the death penalty, most recently Illinois, which did so last month, following similar actions by New Mexico in 2009 and New Jersey in 2007.

“Connecticut’s death penalty is a failed public policy,” said Ben Jones, executive director of the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty. “It fails victims’ families by prolonging the legal process, it fails to guarantee that an innocent person won’t be convicted, and it fails taxpayers by diverting resources that could be put towards programs that actually keep us safer.”

Since 1989, more than 250 people in 34 states have been exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing and the cost of having the death penalty on the books in Connecticut yearly is $4 million.

HARTFORD — Clergy representing hundreds of Christian and Jewish congregations in the state came to the Capitol Tuesday to support abolition of the death penalty as an "ineffective, unfair and fallible response to violence."

More than 300 of them signed a letter in opposition to the penalty and urged lawmakers to replace it with a sentence of life in prison with no possibility of release for certain murders.

The group said the death penalty wastes resources, prolongs victims' pain, applies disproportionately to the poor and puts innocent lives at risk of execution.

Since 1973, 138 individuals across the country sentenced to death were later exonerated, while four men in Connecticut were found to have been wrongly convicted of murder in the past two years.

State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, the lead sponsor of repealing the death penalty, said a vote on it by the Judiciary Committee will take place before April 15.

Ending the death penalty was approved in a bipartisan vote in 2009 as a punishment that was unworkable, but then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed it. Only one person on death row in Connecticut, Michael Ross, has been executed in the past 50 years, after he personally rejected all appeals.

Support for the death penalty in Connecticut is at an all-time high in the state in the wake of the home invasion and murders in Cheshire, but voters continue to be almost evenly split on the issue when offered the option of life without parole, according to the Quinnipiac Poll.

Connecticut voters support the death penalty 67 percent to 28 percent. But when given the option of life without parole, 48 percent favor death for first-degree murder, with 43 percent in favor of a life sentence, also a new high.

On Tuesday, several of the clergy, representing different denominations, argued against the penalty based on their religious teachings and justice issues.

Rabbi Donna Berman, a member of the steering committee of Reclaiming the Prophetic Voice, a statewide network of people of faith committed to non-violence, called capitol punishment "a stain upon civilization and upon our religious conscience ... that taps into a primal place where we want to see justice done."

"Let us commit ourselves to seeing justice done this way: Through repair of a system that is riddled with racism and classism. Let us create a system of true equity and fairness lest we become what we claim to abhor: murderers ourselves," Berman said.

Rep. Bruce Morris, D-Norwalk, who is also a minister, said "when religious leaders speak, I believe that there is a moral authority with which they speak that legislators and people throughout this entire state of Connecticut listen to."

The Rev. Charles Wildman, interim conference minister of the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ, said the $4 million spent every year on death penalty cases in Connecticut, is an "enormous waste of taxpayer dollars" that could be put to better use hiring teachers, police and social workers, as well as supporting programs to save young people from lives of crimes and preparing them for "lives of service."
Because polls show that the state is split on the question of punishing people with life in prison, as opposed to the death penalty, Holder-Winfield thought having the clergy speak out could have an effect on lawmaker's vote.

Holder-Winfield said the makeup of the legislature is somewhat different than it was in 2009 and the triple murder of the Petit family in Cheshire in 2007, which is now going through the courts, complicates the issue, but shouldn't derail repeal.

"I believe the job of the legislature is to give to the people of state security, and that is life without the possibility of parole," Holder-Winfield said.

HARTFORD — Despite saying last year that it had no objection to a bill that would eliminate the statute of limitations on the sexual abuse of minors going forward, a representative of the Catholic Church Monday at a public hearing said it could not agree with the concept.

“I’m just so surprised they are opposing this. We certainly had the sense last year that they would not,” Sen. Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, said of the bill she proposed that eliminates the limitation on civil suits prospectively.

Bills that would have removed any limitation on when a suit could be brought retroactively, aimed to a large extent at the childhood victims of Dr. George Reardon, a former physician at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, failed to go forward in 2009 and 2010.

More than 100 lawsuits have been brought against Reardon, who died in 1998, and against St. Francis. Police say more than 50,000 slides of child pornography found in the home where Reardon once lived had belonged to the doctor, who practiced medicine at St. Francis for more than 30 years.

Michael C. Culhane, spokesman for the Connecticut Catholic Conference, testified last year that changing the rules retroactively was not fair. “We therefore request that any changes be prospective and not have any retrospective effect,” Culhane said in 2010.

Culhane testified Monday that the statute should encourage timely filing of claims and there is no limitation on bringing a civil claim against a convicted perpetrator of sexual abuse. Connecticut law allows civil suits to be brought up to 30 years after a victim reaches the age of 18.

The Catholic Church has paid out million of dollars to settle sex abuse cases throughout the country. Most recently, a grand jury in Philadelphia accused the archdiocese of providing a safe haven to 37 priests who were credibly accused of sexual abuse or had behaved inappropriately with children.

Culhane testified in favor of a bill that lifts the ban on childhood sexual abuse lawsuits against government entities and allows them and their employees to be held civilly liable on sex abuse cases as is now the case with private, nonpublic institutions.

“Until public institutions are held accountable for sexual assault crimes committed against minors to the same extent as their private counterparts, the necessary safeguards will not be implemented and our children will continue to be victimized,” Culhane said in his written testimony.

But when asked by Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, if he would support the elimination of the statute going forward, if lawmakers also amended the limited immunity that applies to towns and workers acting in their official capacity, Culhane said he would not.

Holder-Winfield, a victim of sexual abuse by a friend of his family when he was young boy, spoke up after watching the faces of the victims of sexual abuse when they were asked why they did not come forward earlier. “I’m an almost 40-year-old man and I have very intimate awareness” of this issue, he said. The reasons victims don’t come forward are “multiple,” he said. “It’s frustrating to listen how cavalier people are to other people’s pain,” he said, outside the hearing room. He said he spoke up to set a tone of respect for the victims.

Bye asked Culhane why no other institution, beyond the church, had any problem with the bill. Culhane said he did not know why.

The clergy, meeting in the Legislative Office Building, presented a letter signed by more than 300 urging passage of legislation (HB 5036), which was introduced by Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield (D-New Haven), vice chairman of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee and chairman of the Black and Puerto Rican caucus.

Rep. Bruce Morris (D-Norwalk), who is also a minister in his hometown, emceed the event that included Catholic, Baptist, Quaker, Presbyterian, United Methodist, Episcopal, Unitarian Universalist, Greek Orthodox, United Church of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and Jewish leaders.

“It’s significant that so many representatives of the major religious traditions in Connecticut gathered here today to speak out against the death penalty,” Morris said.

Holder-Winfield accepted the letter on behalf of legislators.

“As much as opinions vary about capital punishment within society at large, opinion among religious leaders is strongly in favor of repealing the death penalty,” he said.

The religious leaders’ letter states:

“The public often seeks our guidance on tough issues, and we have concluded that the death penalty fails us. In Connecticut, the law already provides a severe alternative punishment for capital murders – life in prison without the possibility of release.

“We join many in Connecticut who question capital punishment due to its record as an ineffective, unfair and fallible response to violence. The death penalty applies disproportionately to the poor and minorities and puts innocent lives at risk of execution.

“Since 1973, 138 individuals sentenced to death were later exonerated of their crimes. When a human life is at stake, there is simply no room for error.

“As religious leaders, we often serve as resources to victims' families in the aftermath of murder. Given this responsibility, we have a special interest in advocating for policies that serve their needs and promote healing and well-being. There is growing evidence that the death penalty does the opposite: it prolongs victims' pain and delays healing while appeals and reversals force families to relive their trauma.

“Finally, we cannot ignore the millions of dollars it costs to prosecute a capital case. In light of the serious economic challenges facing our state and nation, the valuable resources expended on the death penalty would be better invested in programs to prevent crime and meet the needs of victims’ families.”

State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, with state Rep. Bruce Morris at his side, addresses a press conference at the Legislative Office Building at which clergy members spoke in favor of repealing the state’s death penalty for certain murders.

The letter signed by more than 300 will be given to state Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield (D-New Haven) and other lawmakers during a vigil at 10:30 a.m. on the North steps of the State Capitol. Holder-Winfield is the lead sponsor of legislation (HB 5036) that replaces the death penalty with a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of release for certain murders. The letter presentation and news conference to follow will be led by Rep. Bruce Morris (D-Norwalk), who is a minister.

Gathering outside the State Capitol on the North steps will be a diverse group, including Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, United Methodist, Episcopal, Quaker, Unitarian Universalist, Greek Orthodox, United Church of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and Jewish faith leaders.

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On the day Illinois is expected to abolish the death penalty, Connecticut lawmakers are grappling with the same question.

Gary Holder-Winfield Photo:Chion Wolf

Democrats in this state who want to repeal the law allowing executions feel this is their year - with a Governor who says he’ll sign a “prospective” law. But many people from both parties want to keep the punishment as a tool for prosecutors.

At a public hearing this week lawmakers on both sides heard from Dr. William Petit, the sole survivor of a triple homicide that cost his his family.;He wants to preserve the death penalty - and polls show that most state residents agree.

Today, where we live, we’ll consider the politics and policy of the death penalty, and whether it works as a deterrent.

We’ll also look at what a Supreme Court ruling this week might mean for future death row inmates, and we’ll check in with a Chicago Tribune columnist about Illinois’ decision to repeal the death penalty.

If approved by the legislature, Espinosa would be the first Hispanic woman to serve on Connecticut’s Appellate Court.

“Prior to Dan Malloy becoming governor, he talked about the need for more diversity in our state’s judicial system,” Holder-Winfield said. “With this nomination and the recent one of Judge Lubbie Harper Jr. as associate justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, Governor Malloy is living up to his promise to make the court system more representative of the people who make up our population.”

Holder-Winfield recalled the caucus’s struggle to highlight the need for more diversity in the courts during last year’s legislative hearings on judicial nominations.

“Having gone through that battle, today’s nomination and last week’s are a very positive development in the effort to ensure fairness in our courts,” he said.

Hartford - They stood in a row behind the podium in hearing room 1B of the Legislative Office Building Wednesday, more than a dozen fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters of the murdered.

Some held pictures of those they have lost over their hearts as, one by one, others took a turn at the podium to explain why they, collateral victims, don't want the killers of their loved ones killed.

They were there to ask the state legislature to end the death penalty, bringing with them a petition signed by 76 family members of murder victims.

Their argument was a simple one: Connecticut's death penalty is broken; it perpetuates a system that torments the victims' families with a promise of closure that never comes.

Indeed, the only resident of death row to be executed in the past 50 years was serial killer Michael Ross, who did not die until 2005,

21 years after his arrest, and only then because he sought his own execution.

"It's time to put an end to the death penalty in this state, because we have learned that the process frequently causes more harm to surviving family members," said George Kain, an associate professor of justice and law administration at Western Connecticut State University.

"It's time for us to listen to those who have suffered through this process and to support them in putting an end to any further pain and suffering that this process causes," Kain said.

Wednesday's news conference, hosted by state Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, and the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty, gave voice to that pain.

'Over and over again'

Dr. Gail Canzano of West Hartford spoke of the death of her brother-in-law, Thomas E. Otte, in 1999.

"As a clinical psychologist with many years of experience of treating individuals suffering from the effects of trauma, I can tell you that the death penalty is injurious to families of murder victims. Why? Because every single court appearance retraumatizes the family, forcing them to relive the murder of their loved one over and over again," she said.

"These criminals could be put away and forgotten," Canzano said, "but instead they become celebrities, and we torture the families of their victims by dragging them through decades of publicity and court proceedings. Tell me, where is the justice in that? ... The death penalty doesn't work, and it's not possible to fix it."

Pamela Joiner of Hartford spoke of her son, Jumar, who was shot to death in 2008. And she pleaded for the state to put more resources into helping families heal.

"The year my son was killed, there were 112 homicides in Connecticut," Joiner said. "That's 112 mothers. Each of us deserves to be heard ... and yet our stories are rarely heard and our needs go unaddressed."

Elizabeth Brancato of Torrington spoke of the death of her mother, Barbara.

"I experienced the nightmare of being trapped in the criminal justice process. For five years my family and I endured the trial and the appeal process of my mother's killer," Brancato said. "The trial demanded all my attention. ... My healing was put on hold; my grief was put on hold."

Kristin Froehlich spoke of her brother's death in Georgetown.

"I learned that the purpose of a trial is not to support victims. The legal system was designed to address the law that has been broken, not to heal broken hearts and shattered lives," she said.

"One way of healing from trauma is to tell our stories. However, the legal system restricts the voices of survivors. In my case, the trial only allowed family members to speak during the sentencing.

"We couldn't face or speak directly to the man who killed my brother. We had to submit our statements in writing in advance to make sure they were appropriate and not too inflammatory, and we were cautioned against showing strong emotions."

And Walter Everett of Bridgeport spoke of the death of his son, Scott.

"A capital trial to follow through to an execution costs the state of Connecticut some $4 million," he said. "They can save two-thirds of that with life sentences.

"I am convinced that the state of Connecticut ought to abolish the death penalty and take some of the millions of dollars which they would save by using that money for victims' services, to allow victims to start to heal," Everett said.

Passage uncertain

Holder-Winfield, who is co-sponsoring the bill to abolish the death penalty with state Rep. Roland Lemar, D-New Haven, said he thinks the bill has a good chance of passing this session, and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has said he would sign it into law.

The governor's promise might bring out opponents to the bill and make its passage more difficult this time, he said.

"I'm a realistic person. I think it's more difficult this time," Holder-Winfield said. "But if I am successful, the death penalty will be abolished."

It is the same bill, he said, that passed both houses of the legislature in 2009 and was vetoed by then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell.

As drafted, the bill would apply to all future murder cases and not to the cases of those already on death row or those currently being prosecuted, such as Stephen Hayes, who was sentenced to death, and Joshua Komisarjevsky, yet to be tried, for the 2007 murders of the wife and daughters of Dr. William A. Petit Jr. of Cheshire.

Asked if the bill wouldn't open up a new avenue of appeal for everyone on death row, Holder-Winfield said, "I have concerns about what the impact is, but this is the bill that I think we should get through the House and the Senate."

Canzano gave her own answer to the question: "Those people have endless appeals, and I wouldn't worry about a prospective bill increasing that. They will be appealing forever."

Canzano was asked if she had any advice for William Petit, who has said that he is in favor of the death penalty.

"I am so sorry we were not able to abolish capital punishment before those murders in Cheshire happened, because we've watched over the last year ... what the trial did to that family," she said. "We watched what the trial did to those elderly parents; we watched Dr. Petit weep in the courtroom; we watched that family have to be confronted with bloody photographs, horrifying details, and I can only say that I am so sorry that Dr. Petit has to go through this.

"This family will be going through appeals for decades. I think that they will never see (Hayes and Komisarjevsky) executed.

"I have no advice to Dr. Petit except to tell him he is in our hearts and our prayers and we grieve with his family as they go through this," Canzano said.

"I urge the Connecticut legislature to see to it that this never happens to another family."

Two New Haven legislators are leading the fight to make Connecticut’s death penalty a thing of the past.

On Jan. 5, Democratic State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield (D-New Haven) introduced a bill that would repeal the death penalty in Connecticut. The bill, co-sponsored by newly elected Rep. Roland Lemar (D-New Haven, Hamden), revives the 2009 fight for death penalty abolition, which ended when Republican former governor M. Jodi Rell vetoed a repeal bill that passed both houses of the state legislature. The fate of the bill, which has not yet been discussed, is highly uncertain. While Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy has said that supporters of abolition can count on his signature, passage in the legislature is far from guaranteed.

The current bill, which is also co-sponsored by State Sen. Edwin Gomes (D-Bridgeport), now heads to the Judiciary Committee, which must set a date for a public hearing on the issue. Holder-Winfield, who is the vice-chair of the committee, said an entire day will likely be devoted to the bill, probably in late February or early March.

At a meeting of the Yale College Democrats Monday night, Holder-Winfield spoke about his plans to guide repeal through the legislature as he did in 2009. A freshman representative at the time, Holder-Winfield’s success was the first time Connecticut had ever passed a law repealing the death penalty. The likelihood that repeal will become law in 2011 has been helped by Malloy’s election, he said, but many legislators have been replaced since 2009 and opponents of repeal have had time to organize their efforts.

“When I first started working on this in 2009, people assumed nothing was going to happen because I was a freshman,” Holder-Winfield said. “But the other side is ready now - they’re doing their work.”

One noteworthy opponent of repeal is fellow Democratic State Rep. Mary Fritz, who represents Cheshire, Conn. - the town known across the country as the site of the Petit family triple murder. In July 2007, two men invaded the home of William Petit and sexually assaulted his wife and two daughters before killing them and setting the house on fire. Petit was badly beaten but survived.

Steven Hayes was convicted on 16 of 17 charges in the incident and sentenced to death on Dec. 2. Jury selection for the trial of another suspect, Joshua Komisarjevsky, is due to begin Feb. 22.

While Fritz said she has always supported the death penalty, she felt particularly strongly about it as a representative of Cheshire.

“The murders had a terrible effect on the whole town, and I’ve had many people thank me for standing up for the death penalty,” Fritz said.

She added that she believes any repeal of the death penalty, if it becomes law, will not be retroactive and thus will not affect Hayes’ execution.

Despite Holder-Winfield’s success in 2009, the current bill faces an uphill battle.

In a Quinnipiac University poll released last October, 76 percent of Connecticut voters said they favored the death penalty for Hayes. Since 2005, support for the death penalty has risen in the state from about 59 percent of voters to 65 percent.

“The death penalty sends a clear message to those who may contemplate such cold, calculated crimes,” Rell wrote in her June 2009 veto message. “We will not tolerate those who have murdered in the most vile, dehumanizing fashion.”

Holder-Winfield and Lemar said they have no illusions that repeal’s passage in the legislature will be easy, especially with the backdrop of the Cheshire case.

“It’s going to be a challenging conversation, but it’s one that needs to happen,” Lemar said. “I understand what the polls suggest, and we want to tread lightly in how we talk about the [Cheshire] case, but if you remove yourself from the situation and determine the best public policy, it should be easy to see that the death penalty is not the best option.”

Lemar, who served as New Haven’s Ward 9 Alderman until he resigned to run for state representative, said that one of his main concerns with the death penalty is its administration, which he said has been unfair and uneven. In particular, he said, there have been cases in which people who have been put to death are later found innocent. The state should not be in the business of putting people to death, he said.

At the Dems meeting on Monday, Holder-Winfield argued that more people would support repeal if they were better educated about the death penalty. Contrary to popular belief, he said, there is no evidence that the death penalty deters potential murders, and many convicted murderers do not qualify for the death penalty.

“If you murdered someone in my neighborhood, unless it was me, you wouldn’t get the death penalty,” he said, referring to the various considerations governing eligibility for the death penalty under state law.

Lemar said he was inspired as he watched Holder-Winfield fight as a little-known freshman representative for a measure as controversial as death penalty abolition. Now a freshman himself, Lemar said he will take orders from Holder-Winfield about how to proceed with the bill.

“I watched Gary struggle day after day for months, with will and determination, to get support for repeal and bring it to a vote, ultimately to have it be vetoed by the governor,” Lemar said. “I was so impressed by his passion and his ability.”

The House of Representatives voted 90-56, a surprisingly wide margin, to repeal the death penalty in 2009. Four years earlier, Holder-Winfield’s predecessor in the 94th District, Bill Dyson, who served for 32 years, led a failed effort for repeal.

Nationwide, 35 out of 50 states maintain the death penalty. New York, New Jersey and New Mexico have abolished it within the past seven years. In New England, New Hampshire is the only other state with capital punishment. Connecticut has only put one man to death in the past 50 years: serial killer Michael Ross, who was executed by lethal injection in New London on May 13, 2005.

There are currently ten men on death row in Connecticut.

Gary Holder-Winfield wants to prepare the state for 2020, when it’s estimated that half of the state’s working population will be minority.

“We see Connecticut as being very white,” says the New Haven state representative, “but Connecticut, in 2020, is not so white — half the workforce will be minority. That’s a big percentage, and we need to be very concerned with that … How do we deal with this? It will require a sea change in how we approach things.”

Holder-Winfield is relying on a 2006 report called “New England 2020,” co-authored by Stephen Coelen of UConn’s Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis. It found that 2020 may be the tipping point in terms of population: The report estimates that half of all workers between the ages of 25 and 29 will be a minority in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

The report’s main call is for New England states to implement policies that better educate all state residents and help them prepare intellectually and financially for college.

“I don’t think anything’s been done,” since the report came out four years ago, Holder-Winfield says.

At the time of the study’s release, Coelen noted in a press release, “Today’s talented workforce will not be there for us tomorrow, if current demographic and educational trends play out. If the six New England states prove unable to significantly raise their current levels of educational access and attainment, the region will witness a decline in the quality of its workforce and find itself in serious economic jeopardy.”

Over coffee and carrot cake at Bru Cafe in New Haven, shortly before the start of this year’s legislative session, Holder-Winfield outlined a broad goal that’s still in draft format.

He hopes that his over-arching philosophy will help guide policy decisions aimed at making sure the state’s young minority population will be ready to drive the state’s economy. Then, he says, he’ll “come up with the ideas and policies to reach that goal.”

He’s presented the draft plan to the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus and to Gov. Dannel Malloy, who seemed receptive to the idea.

Holder-Winfield is best known for helping to pass an ambitious bill to abolish the death penalty in 2009, which was vetoed by then-Gov. Jodi Rell. He’s now vice-chair of the legislature’s judiciary committee, and was recently elected chairman of the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus.

He’s hoping to use those positions to push this even more ambitious agenda.

The most obvious problem, Holder-Winfield says, is that the state has the largest educational achievement gap in the country.

As an example of how his new philosophy could help close that gap, he cites two other policy areas that relate back to education: the prison system and the economy.

“They talk about [the achievement gap] in terms of rich/poor,” he says. “Duh. But they’re trying to avoid talking about race, with is a part of it. Economic disparity is racial disparity.”

Holder-Winfield doesn’t think changing education laws alone will help close the gap and help ready more minority students for college. Instead, he says, the policy changes need to be broader and looked at in relation to one another.

For example, he says, “the achievement gap isn’t just about resources, it’s about child development. And in certain neighborhoods that means broken families.”

That can be tackled in part, he says, by reforming the prison system. According to a 2008 report, 43 percent of the male prison population was African American. And, according to a report released last month, of the 3,840 people in state prison because they can’t make bail, 1,458 — or 38 percent — are black. With so many black men in prison, their children are growing up in broken homes. And, because of their prison record, those men have a harder time landing legitimate jobs.

Another area Holder-Winfield would like to zero in on is unemployment. “When we talk about unemployment and job creation, what that translates to is reducing unemployment in the majority of the population. But the minority always has the highest unemployment numbers.”

That, of course, loops back to Holder-Winfield’s declaration that economic disparity is racial disparity.

“I want to attack unemployment in the minority population. We need to be responsible toward the people who will be the drivers of our economy.”

HARTFORD — State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, who is beginning his second term in the House, is on the fast track to leadership positions in the General Assembly.

Holder-Winfield was recently named vice chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, and this week was elected chairman of the legislature’s 20-member Black and Puerto Rican Caucus.

Holder-Winfield, 36, said when he ran for the seat held by retiring Democratic state Rep. Bill Dyson, he promised “to deliver real representation and to do that, you have to become a leader.”

He said the appointments are the result of a combination of “luck” and working hard to demonstrate his leadership abilities.

Last year, Holder-Winfield was instrumental in getting codified in legislation, a new relationship between parents, teachers and administrators in dealing with the educational achievement gap.

Rather than have decisions on closing schools coming from on high, he said parental voices have to be heard on ways to improve schools.

Holder-Winfield has also led the effort to repeal the death penalty in Connecticut and this year wants redistricting to count inmates as residents of their hometowns, rather than where they are incarcerated, a change that would benefit Connecticut cities.

Going forward with the caucus, Holder-Winfield said policy positions will be driven by the demographics that show by 2020, more of the work force will be composed of people from the black and Latino communities.

Given the achievement gap between minorities and whites, there is a strong “economic impetus” to raise up low-income residents to become “true participants in and beneficiaries of our democracy,” Holder-Winfield said.

To keep the state’s economic engine on track, it is imperative that all its citizens get the necessary educational skills they need, he said.

Holder-Winfield also said one of the biggest assets he had after getting elected was having Dyson as a mentor. He said he interned for Dyson in 2003 and found they had an interest in the same topics and they kept in touch.

Dyson, a longtime head of the legislators Appropriations Committee, offered a crash course on how the assembly operates.

Holder-Winfield is a staff member with the American Association of University Professors at Southern Connecticut State University.

Holder-Winfield, who is beginning his second term in the legislature, will lead the 20-member caucus for the next two years.

“I am honored to be elected to this position by my colleagues and to be given the chance to work with them in this new capacity to ensure that in these times the voices and concerns of all the citizens of Connecticut are heard,” Holder-Winfield said Thursday.

“As we move toward 2020 more and more of our workforce becomes composed of people from Connecticut's Black and Latino community,” Holder-Winfield said. “If we are to be good stewards of the economy, it is time to re-examine policy, with an eye toward ensuring that these citizens are true participants in and beneficiaries of our democracy.”

During the last session the caucus elevated the issue of diversity in the state judiciary and passed a bill addressing the achievement gap, which creates a new relationship with parents, teachers and administrators geared toward using a collaborative model to address the issue.

Holder-Winfield is the vice-chairman of the Judiciary Committee and serves on the Appropriations and Human Services committees. He represents the 94th Assembly District, which includes New Haven. 

State lawmakers who oppose the death penalty will try again in the coming legislative session to get a bill passed that would abolish it, with debates likely to coincide with the trial of Joshua Komisarjevsky, who potentially faces the death penalty in connection with the deadly 2007 Cheshire home invasion.

Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, now vice chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he reintroduced the bill shortly after the November election.

An earlier bill that would have abolished the state’s death penalty, which had the same language as the latest version, passed the General Assembly, but Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed it in 2009.

If it were to pass, the latest bill would replace the death penalty as the state’s severest punishment with life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“I don’t see the value of having a death penalty,” Holder-Winfield said. “The arguments for it don’t hold up. If you can incarcerate someone for life, you have met the burden of keeping people safe. One argument is that it deters people, but violent crime in Texas hasn’t decreased. I think the argument that it is justice is even more tenuous.”

If the latest bill is successful, it would only affect crime suspects convicted after the time of passage, according to Holder-Winfield. Therefore, the 10 men currently on death row in Connecticut, including Komisarjevsky’s co-defendant, Steven Hayes, would not be affected by any change and “would remain on death row,” Holder-Winfield said.

Supporters of the bill are hopeful it will pass, especially since Gov.-elect Dan Malloy has taken an anti-death penalty stance.

However, the election and changes in the membership of the legislature, along with publicity on the Komisarjevsky case, are also going to play roles, Holder-Winfield said.

“If we can get it to the governor, then it has a better chance of passing,” Holder-Winfield said. “We are rejoicing to have Dan Malloy. But there is a new batch of people, new legislators. I don’t operate under the assumption that it will happen.”

Hayes was convicted of capital felonies for his role in the 2007 Cheshire home invasion that ended in the deaths of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters, Michaela Petit, 11, and Hayley Petit, 17.
The state also is seeking the death penalty for Komisarjevsky, 30, of Cheshire. Jury selection for his trial is scheduled to begin in late February.

“I do think the timing of that trial will be a factor,” Holder-Winfield said. “Some (legislative) discussions will be around the time of jury selection. It will color whether we can actually get this bill moved.”

Dr. William Petit Jr., formerly of Cheshire, the sole survivor of the home invasion, has urged lawmakers to keep the death penalty.

“People want to be respectful of Dr. Petit,” Holder-Winfield said. “It may be difficult for people because of that — you don’t want to seem callous.”

But the timing of the Komisarjevsky trial didn’t deter him from reintroducing the bill.

“I think the death penalty is wrong, and the right time to do the right thing is always now,” Holder-Winfield said.

The Judiciary Committee’s new chairmen, Sen. Eric Coleman, D-Bloomfield, and Rep. Gerald Fox, D-Stamford, both voted in favor of the bill in 2009.

Connecticut’s last execution was May 13, 2005, when serial killer Michael Ross was put to death after he willingly halted his appeals. Before Ross, the state had not executed anyone since Joseph Taborsky in 1960.