CONNECTICUT, USA — A prosecutorial accountability bill is up for public debate Wednesday could soon bring changes to the criminal justice system in the state and the lawyers it would affect take issue with the bill.
In a letter released by Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo and 13 other states attorneys, prosecutors are explaining why they think the bill should be shut down.
"There isn’t a lot of accountability. We have 13 different judicial districts; there’s not uniform policy and implementation of those practices," says 135th District Representative Anne Hughes (D), a co-sponsor of bill 1810. "There’s not a lot of oversight; there’s not a lot of data."
The bill is building upon a bill passed in 2019, which required the state to collect and publish data on prosecutorial decisions about charges, diversionary programs, bail requests, plea deals, and sentencing recommendations.
"What we didn’t speak to in the legislature, or to the legislation, was what was to be done with that data," says ACLU CT's Executive Director, David McGuire. "[W]e don’t want the division of criminal justice to collect data for data collection sake. We want to use it to make our system more fair and equitable."
This new bill up for debate would force the Criminal Justice Commission to use that data in training and reviewing the performance of prosecutors.
But prosecutors and defense lawyers argue too much oversight by way of uniform policies across the state's 13 districts would politicize the criminal justice system and take away prosecutorial discretion.
"One of the problems with that is there’s really no one size fits all criminal justice system. The person that commits the crime in Stamford might have prior convictions and the person that commits the crime in New Britiain might not," says Chief State's Attorney, Richard Colangelo. "There are so many variables to say that person A and person B should be treated the exact same way. It’s very difficult to do in the system because there isn’t a one size fits all."
Criminal defense attorneys agree. President of the CT Criminal Defense Lawyers Association Frank Riccio is testifying against the bill.
"If A then B. If you're charged with this crime, then this will happen. That lack of discretion I think will hurt every single criminal defendant," says Riccio.
Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo argues the infrastructure to collect data was up and running by January of this year. He says it’s too soon to say that there is a problem this bill would need to fix.
A 2018 Prison Policy Initiative report showed Connecticut has the 10th lowest incarceration rate in the country but is among the 10 worst in disproportionately imprisoning Black and Latino adults.
These are the very conversations that will be had when the prosecutorial accountability bill is up for debate at a public hearing on March 10.
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