Laura Glesby file photo
Attorney Taubes: The statewide commutation pause is "a harm that Governor Lamont has inflicted on essentially everyone who’s in prison across the United States."
A civil rights attorney looking to tackle mass incarceration on a local level is sounding the alarm on a statewide decision he worries could pose nationwide consequences for people appealing their prison time.
Alex Taubes, a New Haven-based lawyer best known for successfully arguing hundreds of years off the prison sentences of Connecticut residents convicted of often violent crimes, spoke out on Wednesday against Gov. Ned Lamont’s decision to temporarily halt prison commutations and remove the chair of the state’s parole board. He offered that criticism and warning during an interview on WNHH FM’s “Just-In Time Conversations” program hosted by Hamden Council Representative Justin Farmer. (Click on the video below to watch the interview in full.)
“Connecticut stands as the only state with no functioning commutation or clemency process because it’s been put on hold by our governor,” Taubes said during that radio interview. “Political science professors will be writing about this for years — it sends a shot across the bow, not only to [Carleton Giles, whom the governor recently removed as the chair of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles]… but to all parole board members, nationwide: Don’t let people out!”
The gubernatorial actions that Taubes was criticizing were taken by Lamont after Republican representatives complained about a jump in sentence commutations granted this past year, with 71 sentences shortened in 2022 compared to no more than three in any other year since 2016.
Lamont removed former police officer Carleton Giles as chair of the Board of Pardons and Paroles and temporarily halted that board’s ability to grant commutations “pending an expeditious review of its policies and processes,” as the governor wrote in a public statement.
Read here in the CT Mirror about how those two decisions saw Lamont effectively siding with Republicans who said the General Assembly should have had a chance to review updates to the board’s commutation policies in 2021 and 2022, though state law does not require the board to pass any such revisions by the legislature.
“If this is your field, your career, and if your family’s life depends on not having a governor scapegoat you because of some misinformation put out by Republicans with no checks and balances, are you gonna take the risk of what’s already a courageous decision, to let someone out of prison?” Taubes asked in the recent radio interview. “When the easy decision and the default decision and the decision that has driven our politics and our system for decades has been ‘leave them in prison?’ No. It’s a chilling effect.”
He continued: “It’s a harm that Governor Lamont has inflicted on essentially everyone who’s in prison across the United States.”
Watch Taubes' full interview on WNHH above.
Taubes himself grew up in Madison with, in his words, “a silver spoon in my mouth.” His shoreline upbringing informed his desire to practice law in Connecticut later in life — to use the skills, connections, education and systemic savviness that he attributes to his privileged upbringing, including a degree from Yale Law School, to “become someone who was trying to change the system and not just be of and for the system that currently exists” in a way that could spark positive local change.
A profile of Taubes published in the Hartford Courant last year stated that Taubes has taken more than 500 years off prison sentences throughout his career thus far. Most of the sentences he’s managed to shorten were for individuals convicted of felonies while they were young and given exceptionally long terms in prison.
“It’s easier to say I do want reforms to the criminal justice system, but I want to help people who committed nonviolent crimes,” Taubes said during the interview, suggesting that Lamont and other politicians looking for votes are unlikely to pledge energy to seeking restorative justice for people who have committed some of the least sympathetic crimes.
State Republican legislators, meanwhile, campaigned for the commutations suspension which Lamont ultimately issued by speaking out against sentence reductions or perpetrators of violent crimes. For example, Taubes criticized a press conference held by Republicans with family members of victims of violent crimes, such as John Aberg, the grandfather of the late Andrew Slyter who was sexually assaulted and murdered at just three years old. Aberg argued that people who have committed acts such as murder shouldn’t even be considered for early release.
However, Taubes said, beyond ideas of restorative justice or the massive expense of the prison industrial complex, a functioning pardons and parole board is a key “safety valve” in an inherently flawed criminal justice system, from the arrest process through to trial to plea bargains.
Commutations allow for people who were wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced, or who would otherwise receive lesser punishment today, to pursue some degree of personal justice.
He pointed to Darryl Valentine, a former client who Taubes said “was convicted of a double murder that he had no part in.” The parole board ultimately took 57 years off his life sentence after he already served 32.
“It’s a complicated issue. There’s people on both sides,” Taubes acknowledged. “We’re not talking about non-violent drug offenses, we’re not talking about fender benders. Old wounds are opening up, people are being retraumatized, and I have sympathy for that.”
Read here about one sentence modification case Taubes is currently working on, in which a man who has spent decades in prison for a murder he committed at 18 is seeking to get out of prison after having already spent more than three decades behind bars. The victim’s family and friends, meanwhile, have argued for maintaining the man’s 60-year prison sentence as they continue to grieve the murder of a loved one.
Ultimately, Taubes said during his recent WNHH radio interview, the current statewide political controversy around commutations illustrates that “it’s just easy to scapegoat people who’ve done something wrong because presumably there’s someone out there who doesn’t want them out of prison. It’s not always true, but they’re an easy target for politics.
“No one wants to stand up for them. It’s just not a vote getter… but that’s not going to solve the problem of being the prison capital of the world.”
“Connecticut stands as the only state with no functioning commutation or clemency process because it’s been put on hold by our governor,”
It's worse than that.
We have no clear cut philosophy or programs that promote rehabilitation and set reasonable limits on incarceration for non-violent or violent crimes.
It appears that once you have the misfortune to be inducted into the prison-industrial complex, you have no rights as a human being and no real access to resource that might prepare you for return to society.
Our system is primitive and the Governor comes from a different class than the people who usually end up in state prison so he has no insight or creativity to envision anything but the standard, failed model.
Cheers to Alex for his work.
When will we start investing in people instead of death and destruction?