Gov. Ned Lamont and the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus will proceed with an agreement to collaborate on nominating Connecticut’s first independent watchdog over the state’s jails and prisons, officials said Thursday, offering a conclusion to months of disputes over the governor’s earlier selection of Hilary Carpenter.
On Wednesday, The Connecticut Mirror reported that lawmakers struck a deal that would result in Lamont and the BPRC working hand-in-hand on choosing an interim correctional ombudsperson, reopening the hiring process for the position, and selecting an official nominee around the start of 2025.
The deal arose after lawmakers expressed concerns about the process that resulted in Lamont choosing Carpenter, a veteran public defender and death penalty adversary, to lead the Office of the Correction Ombuds. The governor’s nomination went against the guidance of the Correction Advisory Committee, which ranked Ken Krayeske and Barbara Fair, two advocates often critical of the administration and its handling of criminal justice affairs, more favorably.
[CT lawmakers, Lamont agree on new process for prison ombuds appointment]
Lawmakers worked throughout Wednesday on bill language that would have codified the agreement into state law ahead of the legislature’s midnight adjournment deadline. But it ultimately died in the Senate after the House advanced it within an hour of the clock running out.
On Thursday, however, Lamont and Sen. Gary Winfield, co-chair of the Judiciary Committee and a member of the BPRC, made their intent clear: move forward with the agreed-upon framework.
“We’re going to work that through and make sure that we have probably a new candidate that we can agree upon, working very closely with the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus,” Lamont said during a press briefing on the 2024 legislative session.
“I think we still all understood that, bill or not, there was a way to proceed forward, and that was to work together,” Winfield said in a later interview.
The new agreement directs the Lamont administration and the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus to choose an interim ombudsperson — who will have the authority to investigate complaints from incarcerated people, access agency records and draft a yearly report on confinement conditions in the DOC — by July. By September, the Correction Advisory Committee, a panel of justice-impacted people and correctional experts, will reopen the hiring process for the position. It will forward its recommendation to the governor in December.
Lamont, in consultation with the BPRC, will then have 30 days to make his nomination to the General Assembly, which reconvenes in January.
The nominee needs approval from both the House and the Senate, which Carpenter was unable to attain, resulting in the current situation. She did not return a call or message for comment on Thursday.
The agreement between Lamont and the BPRC offers what had previously been an unclear pathway in the event that Carpenter failed to gain approval from the legislature.
[Facing deadline, Hilary Carpenter prison ombuds appointment in doubt]
The current statute governing the position makes it clear that Lamont can appoint someone in the interim if he makes his nomination while out of session, but not necessarily what he can do if his nominee fails to receive a vote during session.
Following Lamont’s vetting of Krayeske, Fair and Carpenter earlier this year, which included having each of the contenders meet with his senior staff, the DOC’s top brass, and not himself, he chose Carpenter. The governor’s office cited her experience as the reason for his decision. But it did not provide a clear explanation for why he bypassed Krayeske and Fair, both of whom have criticized his administration for its handling of matters pertaining to criminal justice.
Krayeske was the lead attorney in a major Hepatitis C class-action lawsuit, which prompted Connecticut to drastically change how it treats incarcerated people for the deadly liver disease. Fair, the leading organizer of Stop Solitary CT, introduced the PROTECT Act to the legislature, which increased the mandated hours of out-of-cell time for incarcerated people, limited the DOC’s use of solitary confinement and created the Office of the Correction Ombuds.
Carpenter was more of an “unknown entity,” as she said in a public hearing, given that public defenders are not often in the public eye. She has said that she believes her nearly 20 years of experience serving poor and low-income residents make her a qualified candidate for the long-anticipated role.
But her resume, which includes leading and growing the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty, did not resonate well with some advocates, who have voiced their belief that the state’s public defense system has played an outsized role in the negative experiences people have in the criminal legal system.
In committee, lawmakers cast an unusual two votes on Carpenter’s nomination, the first against her and the second in her favor. Top officials had also expressed displeasure about the process leading up to Carpenter’s selection, including Lamont’s requirement that the candidates meet with Department of Correction Commissioner Angel Quiros prior to announcing a decision.
Lawmakers said they did not anticipate the public’s opposition to Carpenter’s selection. They viewed her collegiality with prison reform advocates as a prerequisite for approving her nomination, which she struggled to achieve.
The bill that lawmakers attempted to pass on Wednesday would have accounted for a similar situation in the future, making clear that if the General Assembly failed to take action on an appointment, the position would be considered vacant and an associate correction ombudsperson — as designated by the Correction Advisory Committee — would serve as acting ombudsperson.
Fair, who led the opposition to Carpenter’s appointment, said on Wednesday that she supports the new process. She also plans to reapply for the position and is concerned about the possibility that the interim ombudsperson may be someone who will maintain the status quo. Krayeske voiced a similar concern, though he is unclear on whether he will resubmit his candidacy.
Winfield said his assumption is that as long as the governor and the BPRC work together in a way that honors the intent of the proposed statute, both parties will come to an agreeable solution.
“I think what happens going forward is we do have the meeting of the minds; we do try to figure out if there’s a candidate that we can live with that we feel like can do the job, that the governor can put forward,” Winfield said. “What happens after that appointment of the interim is slightly less clear to me, given that there have been conversations about how a process would operate that is not currently in place subsequent to that. But at the very least, we would have somebody who is functioning in that capacity. And if nothing else, that’s a positive step forward.”