Attorney general candidate Ken Krayeske at WNHH FM.
Ken Krayeske is asking voters to elect him the next state attorney general so he can settle cases with civil-rights attorneys like himself who file lawsuits on behalf of brutalized prisoners.
Krayeske, who is 50 and lives in New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood, is the Green Party candidate for the attorney general’s job. He is challenging incumbent Democrat William Tong. Republican Jessica Kordas is also seeking the position.
The AG’s office represents the state when someone sues it. It reflexively fights those suits even when it should acknowledge misconduct and seek accountability, Krayeske argued during an interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
“They never look and say, ‘Geez it looks like our guys did something bad here,’ ” Krayeske said of the office’s public safety division. “When it sees constitutional violations, it tries to litigate its way out of them rather than admit they were wrong.”
Krayeske, who worked as a journalist before pursuing a legal career, is one of those attorneys who sues the state. That makes him different from the classic AG candidate with a background in corporate law.
He won one case that forced the state to spend $40 million testing 20,000 inmates for hepatitis; an estimated 1,101 have been cured in three years as a result.
He won a $1.3 million payment for Wayne World, who was told his stage IV lymphoma was simply psoriasis; he was not diagnosed until his skin was melting off his body.
He represented Tianna Laboy, who won a $250,000 settlement after she had to gave birth in a prison toilet.
As attorney general, Krayeske said, he would not fight cases involving abuse of prisoners or arrestees when the state is wrong. He complained that Tong has made holding state supervisors accountable for misconduct on their watch even harder than before by successfully appealing a lower-court verdict against a supervisor in a 2020 case involving Cara Tangreti, who was repeatedly raped by prison guards: “He got two Trump judges [to] upend the post-Word War II Nuremberg model of supervisory accountability.”
The decision sets a baseline that a state can choose to follow in limiting liability to corrections officers or cops who harm people in their custody rather than their supervisor. If elected, Krayeske said, he would pursue policies that go beyond that baseline in choosing when to fight or not fight a lawsuit. “We don’t have to litigate.”
He was asked whether the attorney general is carrying out its duty to protect taxpayer liability by fighting cases filed against the state.
“Wayne World’s son is a taxpayer. Tianna Laboy’s daughter will be a taxpayer. Tianna Laboy’s mom who has custody of the baby born in prison is a taxpayer,” Krayeske responded. “Everyone in prison has a family that is paying taxes. Everyone in prison has an interest in the way the state of Connecticut is run.”
He also argued that there are moral and ethical reasons not to fight certain suits, and that the state can save money long-term by establishing that it will not protect misconduct.
Asked about Krayeske’s argument, Tong’s reelection campaign defended the attorney general’s approach.
“The primary constitutional and statutory responsibility of the Office of the Attorney General is to serve as the state’s lawyer and to represent the state, its agencies, and officials. As a result, the attorney general has a legal and ethical obligation to zealously represent his state clients, and he takes that obligation very seriously. Any candidate for attorney general must understand that,” the campaign wrote in a statement sent to the Independent.
“It is not appropriate, during an election campaign, for the Attorney General to engage with any candidate who has or had active litigation with our office and a financial interest in the outcome of that litigation. Further, the Attorney General makes decisions about cases based on facts and the law, and does not concede, forfeit or throw cases because an opposing attorney or candidate wants him to. The attorney general will continue to do his job by actively and strongly representing the state and will respond to Mr. Krayeske where appropriate — in court.”
Krayeske also criticized Tong for not joining a lawsuit filed by the California attorney general seeking to push Uber to classify its drivers as employees rather than gig workers who lack insurance and protections. The Tong campaign responded that it doesn’t “comment on the basis of our law enforcement decisions,” but noted that the AFL-CIO and Working Families Party have endorsed Tong’s reelection campaign and that “the California suit was not a multistate matter” with other attorneys general invited to sign on.
In the “Dateline” interview, Krayeske also spoke about working through the CIRMA organization to tie municipal liability insurance to government policies that limit police conduct; and about advocating for turning Connecticut’s local school districts into one statewide district (which would be no larger than New York City’s) to address still-unmet school desegregation challenges addressed in the Sheff v. O’Neill lawsuit.
Click on the video to watch the full interview with Green Party attorney general candidate Ken Krayeske on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
I'm very proud of this candidate for Attorney General that the Green Party of Connecticut is putting forward this year. With a decade of experience suing the state, and winning cases for those not getting their constitutional due, we can feel confident Ken Krayeske as Attorney General would continue to hold the rights of Connecticuts Citizen's rights paramount above all other interests : this really is the ideal candidate!! Because Ken is running under the financial auspices of the Green Party of CT, donations to the party will support his campaign, so please donate here. https://ctgreenparty.org/donate.html
Thanks!