Sympathetic old-timers told Gary Holder-Winfield his bill to abolish the death penalty would never pass. He proved them wrong — then ended up face to face with the governor at a crossroads in history.
Holder-Winfield (pictured) finished his first regular session as a New Haven state representative in a spot it takes many legislators years to reach.
He defied predictions, and death threats, by leading a successful charge to pass a controversial bill, only to fail in a last-minute private plea to dissuade Gov. M. Jodi Rell from vetoing the measure.
The experience left Holder-Winfield determined to do what he can to help somebody unseat Gov. Rell next year.
It also confirmed his conviction that “you just have to do what you think is right” at the state Capitol no matter what convention calls for. If he had “acted the way freshman are supposed to act,” he said, the death-penalty abolition movement in Connecticut “would still be saying, ‘Some day we’ll get it passed.’”
“Sometimes,” he said, “you have to say, ‘I see things different,’ and run with that.”
Baton Passed
Holder-Winfield reflected in an interview Thursday on the lessons for his remarkable roller coaster ride to legislative heights and back inside the surreal amusement park under the Capitol dome.
He seized the death penalty issue his first day in office this January.
He had just beaten the Democratic machine to fill a seat held for 32 years by his mentor, state Rep. Bill Dyson. Like Dyson, Holder-Winfield has been an activist for criminal-justice reform, convinced the state disproportionately jails African-Americans rather than offering them opportunities to lead productive lives. Like Dyson, Holder-Winfield opposes the death penalty. He says it disproportionately targets racial minorities. And he calls it unjust, on its own terms and in light of revelations of falsely accused people being executed.
“It’s not my job to put people to death,” he said. “Murder is wrong if it’s done by the state or an individual acting as an individual.”
So on his first day at the Capitol Holder-Winfield submitted his first bill. To abolish the death penalty.
He received the same message from sympathetic veteran legislators and sympathetic activists: That’s nice. But the bill’s going nowhere this year. We tried four years ago and failed. Now it’s too close to the Petit murder, the horrific rape/murder in Cheshire.
“You can’t be a failure unless you try,” Holder-Winfield responded.
He also checked in with his fellow first-term Democrats. They hadn’t been around in 2005 to vote on the death penalty. Nor had lawmakers serving a second-term. A clear majority of these colleagues were ready to vote to repeal.
Still, Ben Jones wasn’t convinced. And Jones leads the most visible group in the state pushing for repeal, the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Maybe, just maybe the state House might pass it, by a small margin, Jones recalled thinking. But his group had done a head count right after the election last November. Based on that, it concluded the bill could never pass the Senate.
“My reaction [to Holder-Winfield] was: This is a first-time legislator. He may be a little naive. I was worried about getting people’s hopes up,” Jones recalled Thursday.
Petit Shows Up
Prospects seemed even dimmer when a version of Holder-Winfield’s proposal, HB6578, came before the Judiciary Committee on Feb. 26. Even before the bill was heard, it had been changed to exempt people already on death row.
And Dr. William Petit — the man who watched his family being butchered before his eyes in Cheshire, then earned an entire state’s sympathy — showed up to the hearing to urge legislators to preserve the death penalty.
Holder-Winfield decided to press the practical argument, not the moral arguments about racial impact or state-sponsored murder. Holder-Winfield is black. So are many of his constituents. That’s not true for the vast majority of the legislators whose votes he needed, he recognized.
That’s why he didn’t press this argument: If someone black gets murdered brutally in Holder-Winfield’s neighborhood, the killer will almost certainly not get the death penalty. When it happened to someone white in Cheshire, everyone knew the death penalty awaited. He didn’t spend much time on emphasizing information in this Yale study revealing racial disparities in the handling of 4,600 Connecticut murders over 34 years. (The study reported that a black defendant is twice as likely to be charged with a capital felony if the victim is white. And that 69 percent of whites accused of committing a capital-eligible felony against a white victim actual get capital charges, compared to 90 percent of blacks in the same boat.)
Holder-Winfield instead pressed arguments about how he believes the death penalty doesn’t work. How it doesn’t deter crime. How it’s arbitrary — how someone is seven times more likely to be prosecuted for execution if he lives in Waterbury, because a zealous prosecutor is based there.
“I felt the moral. I pressed the practical,” Holder-Winfield said. “If I talk about poor blacks and Latinos, I might feel that. But it’s not going to play.”
After he spoke at the hearing, as well as on public radio and WTNH, Holder-Winfield received physical threats, including death threats.
He got one such anonymous threat on his cell phone; he gives out the number freely.
“We could get you,” the caller said.
“Well, I live in Newhallville if you want to come,” Holder-Winfield recalls replying.
He said the threats didn’t faze him: “If you’re doing things that are controversial, unfortunately you have to come to expect it.”
Dr. Petit didn’t faze him, either. Other pro-abolition legislators were hesitant to respond to Petit at the hearing, given his pull on public sympathy. Holder-Winfield decided that as the face of the abolition bill, he had to. He also shared in the sympathy for what Petit endured. “I said, ‘Victims are important to me.’” But he noted that plenty of victims who have had relatives murdered line up against the death penalty too. “We can’t make law because one or two people feel something,” he said.
Holder-Winfield and Petit shook hands after the hearing. The exchanges were civil. At that point, conventional wisdom held that Petit and death-penalty supporters had no need to worry. Holder-Winfield’s bill was going nowhere in 2009.
Other Victims Speak
The Judiciary Committee approved the bill and sent it to the state House. That wasn’t a surprise, given the pro-abolition leanings of its chairmen.
By the time the bill came before the full House in May, death-penalty supporters were growing a bit more nervous. Dr. Petit returned to the spotlight, ramping up emotional appeals to legislators to preserve the penalty in his daughters’ and wife’s memory.
But, unexpectedly, a different group of speakers made a different emotional appeal. Three state legislators spoke of how they had relatives brutally murdered. All three supported abolishing the death penalty. Killing their relatives’ killers, they said, wouldn’t bring their relatives back, or stop other people from killing. Click on the play arrow to watch the remarks from one of those legislators, New Haven State Rep. Juan Candelaria.
And click on the play arrow here to watch Holder-Winfield’s testimony.
Holder-Winfield needed 76 votes for the measure to pass. He counted on 82 going into the debate, more than legislative leaders were counting on. The time to vote arrived. The first- and second-term lawmakers lined up as Holder-Winfield expected. And the fence-straddlers were moved by the three legislators’ appeals. The abolition bill pulled a stunning 90 votes, with 56 no votes.
Holder-Winfield made a point of not celebrating. No grins, no fist pumps for the camera. In his view, it was a sober moment.
“It’s not about gaining a victory. It’s about doing what’s right for the people for the state,” he said. “Even though I was 100 percent sure that what we did was the right thing, I knew it was painful” for Dr. Petit. “I feel for the guy, and other people who agree with him.” (Click here to read an item Holder-Winfield blogged at the time.)
That propelled the measure to its supposed graveyard, the Senate. Meanwhile, New Mexico was abolishing the death penalty and that helped too. After a debate that lasted until 4:11 a.m., the Senate, too, shocked observers and passed the bill. However, it fell far short of the majority needed to override a veto by Republican Gov. Rell. And Rell was expected to issue that veto.
The Last Holdout
Before doing so, Rell made time to invite the face of House Bill 6578 to her office for a chat.
Holder-Winfield spent a half hour with the governor and her legislative aide, Chelsea Turner. Not even the gubernatorial gatekeeper, Rell Chief of Staff M. Lisa Moody, was present. (Turner declined Thursday to offer her version of the meeting.)
The discussion was cordial. Holder-Winfield didn’t expect to change the governor’s mind. He gave it his best shot by focusing on practical arguments: That the death penalty has never been shown to deter someone else from killing. That it’s broken in Connecticut, that it discriminates by race, by geography, by prosecutorial whim.
To his surprise, Holder-Winfield recalled, “almost on every point we agreed.”
“I knew that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to veto the bill. But I was very much waiting to see what her veto letter was going to say.”
When he saw Rell’s veto message, he was stunned. “It blew my mind.” Rell said the death penalty wasn’t broken. She said there’s “no doubt” it deters other murderers. She spoke of responding to the desire of victims like Petit — without mentioning victims who felt differently. She acknowledged a previous study finding that the death penalty has an adverse impact on racial minorities and called for reforms that never happened — then, in Holder-Winfield’s paraphrase, “went on the say it’s fine.” She wrote that she saw no need to seek changes in the law. She called law “effective” and “workable.”
Click here to read Rell’s veto message.
Click on the play arrow to watch Holder-WInfield’s remarks at a press conference called to react to the veto. And click here to read a letter Holder-Winfield sent to Rell Wednesday about the message.
5 Lessons
The veto message, not the veto itself, convinced him more than ever that Connecticut needs a new governor, Holder-Winfield said.
“Half the people in my district are ‘those people’” whose lives Rell discounted, Holder-Winfield said Thursday. “I am one of ‘those people.’ She just told all of us: ‘Too bad for you. My ideology is more important than your life.’ I don’t think a person should be governor who puts ideology over people’s lives.”
The freshman cited four other lessons from the abolition episode:
• Sometimes a legislative newcomer has to defy the conventional wisdom about what bills to push and what not to push.
• Talk to everybody on all sides of an issue. He just kept talking up the death penalty bill throughout the session, including to legislators who switched their votes after hearing the debate, he said. In his view, that helped.
• Abolitionists need to “chip away” at the poll numbers showing that 61 percent of the state favored preserving the death penalty. Close to a quarter of that group believes it costs more money to keep a person in prison for life than to pursue the death penalty, Holder-Winfield said. That’s wrong, and his side can change minds by driving the point home, he argued. The same with the 8 to 15 percent of that group believing that the death penalty deters crime.
• “We need to reclaim ‘justice.’ We have advocated that term.” His side can reframe the issue in the process, Holder-Winfield argued.
Count on him to continue trying.
Congratulations Rep Holder-Winfield. Fairness is what lawmaking is all about.