In February, the Norwich Police Department discovered graffitied swastikas and the name “Trump” spray-painted along roadways and an I-395 overpass. But the 40-year-old man who was arrested in early March for the graffiti wasn’t charged with a hate crime.
Putnam Police Chief Christopher Ferace told legislators in testimony to the Judiciary Committee Monday that the incident was an example of why Connecticut’s hate crimes laws need to be revised. Norwich Police Chief Patrick Daley told the New London Day that investigators had searched the statutes — which he described as “a bit scattered” — and were unable to find one that would apply to the situation.
According to law enforcement officials, the case in Norwich wasn’t unique. Statistics from the state Judicial Branch show that between 2018 and October 2024, 485 arrests were made for hate- or bias-driven crimes. Of those, only 83 resulted in convictions.
Kathryn Bare, executive assistant state’s attorney at the Division of Criminal Justice, told the legislature’s Judiciary Committee during Monday’s public hearing that scattered and inconsistent laws leave police and prosecutors “scrambling.” She said out of 80 dispositions done on the six most frequently prosecuted hate crimes in Connecticut in 2023 and 2024, only 40 ended in a conviction, and only half of those were convicted on a bias-related offense.
“What that says to me is that our prosecutors are not confident that they can get a conviction on the most serious, readily provable offense because these statutes are so difficult to understand and apply,” Bare said.
Under the current law, the words “hate crime” never even appear, she added. “Ironically and technically speaking, we live in a state that doesn’t have any crimes that are actually labeled ‘hate crimes,’” she said.
In response, the Hate Crimes Advisory Council, a body created in 2017 by the Connecticut legislature and convened in 2021, proposed a series of changes to the current laws. This year, Gov. Ned Lamont put forth legislation, House Bill 6872, incorporating those changes into state law.
They include moving all the current statutes that pertain to hate crimes into one section, clarifying conflicting language around intent and increasing penalties for criminal acts that are found to have been motivated by bias against a protected group.
Richard Wilson, a professor of law at the University of Connecticut and member of the Hate Crimes Advisory Council, said there’s new urgency to strengthening the state’s hate crimes statutes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending all civil rights litigation being pursued by the U.S. Justice Department. The order prevents prosecutors from taking legal action over alleged hate crimes or discrimination.
“ Connecticut needs to get its house in order now and not later,” Wilson said. “Not next year, not the year after. It needs to get its house in order now in order to address the spike in hate crimes and the potential increase in hate crimes in the future.”
Opposition mounting
But Lamont’s proposal immediately faced challenges from many residents concerned it could be used to target protestors taking part in demonstrations against the war in Gaza.
Protests on college campuses in Connecticut and elsewhere last spring led to conflicts with police and arrests. Last week, the Trump administration cut off funding to Columbia University and warned dozens more higher education institutions — including Yale University — of similar consequences for not protecting Jewish students on campus from harassment. On Saturday, Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian who took a leading role in campus protests, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and told his green card would be revoked in accordance with an Executive Order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.”
Numerous people testifying against Lamont’s bill before Connecticut lawmakers Monday cited Khalil’s arrest as an example of how hate crimes laws could threaten free speech.
“A bill like this must make it absolutely crystal clear that criticizing Zionism, a political ideology, or Israel, a nation, is 1000% not the same thing as committing the hate crime of antisemitism,” Jonathan Mann, a member of the Hartford Jewish Organizing Collective, told the Committee on Monday.
Later this week, opponents of the bill are holding a rally outside the state Capitol. Organizers of the event, the CT Palestine Solidarity Coalition, called the proposed legislation a “blatant attempt to use the language of anti-discrimination to further criminalize people of color.”
Sam Pudlin, also an organizer with the Hartford Jewish Organizing Collective, told The Connecticut Mirror that he felt the bill’s vagueness was dangerous, particularly in light of Khalil’s arrest.
“ There’s been a lot of rhetoric over the last year and a half of people who say that they feel threatened and endangered by very anodyne political speech,” he said. “I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to see that weaponized more and more under the Trump administration, and we should not be helping them out.”
But Sachin Pandya, a professor of law at UConn who worked with the council on the bill, told CT Mirror that he didn’t understand how it could be interpreted this way.
“ What was puzzling to me is the idea that this bill — which has as its primary aim to take existing law, make it consistent in some ways, [and] put it all in one place to make it easier for police and attorneys to use — that this law would somehow make it more likely that it could be used in ways that obviously violate the First Amendment. I just don’t see it,” he said.
Pandya said that in any situation, a prosecutor would have to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a person’s motivation was bias against another person’s religion, race or other protected status.
UConn’s Wilson said he felt the concerns were “misguided.” He noted that laws against hate crimes already exist — this bill was simply putting them in one place.
“ If the law is applied against people based on the political viewpoint they express, that obviously qualifies as a First Amendment violation,” Wilson said. “The Supreme Court has said it’s a bedrock principle that law enforcement cannot suppress political viewpoints.”
Stacey Sobel, the Connecticut Regional Director for the Anti-Defamation League, an advocacy group that studies antisemitism, told CT Mirror the league has observed a rise particularly in antisemitic hate incidents. In Connecticut, as in the U.S, she said, these incidents rose “dramatically” beginning in 2016, and went up “exponentially” since Oct. 7, 2023, she said.
While Connecticut is the 29th most populous state in the country, it ranked 15th in the number of hate crimes being reported, according to ADL. Sobel pointed to the graffitied swastikas found in Norwich and the destruction of a menorah on the Guilford town green. “ People are very scared by these incidents,” she said.
Sobel declined to say whether she felt recent events on college campuses in support of Palestine constituted hate crimes, but she underscored the importance of the First Amendment. She said she considered protests that were “in accordance with First Amendment protected speech” to be acceptable.
Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection Commissioner Ronnell Higgins, who also testified in favor of the bill, noted that agency data shows hate crimes have increased nearly 50% in Connecticut over the last few years, from 87 in 2021 to 130 in the first nine months of 2024.
The details
Many people spoke in opposition to a section of the bill that assigns a Class D felony to hate crimes committed while wearing “a mask or hood.” They said the law would unfairly penalize people who decide to wear a medical mask out of health concerns, or protestors who wear traditional head coverings known as keffiyeh.
UConn’s Pandya told the Committee that the law penalizing masks dated back to 1979 and 1980, when there was a series of cross burnings that happened in the state of Connecticut in conjunction with the visit of Ku Klux Klan member David Duke to the state. He said that between 2000 and 2022, the provision had never been charged.
“A lot of people believe that this mask provision is new, even though it’s been in place for half a century,” Pandya said, adding that concerns could be fairly easily addressed by adding into the law a phrase indicating that the mask was “designed and intended to conceal someone’s identity.”
Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, said he was concerned about passing a law where the purpose for the mask provision didn’t seem clear.
The ADL’s Sobel said the league has been working on masked harassment and intimidation laws in multiple states, after seeing what she described as a “resurgence in masked harassment.” She said she supports that aspect of the Connecticut bill and that she’d like to see a separate law criminalizing any incident where someone wearing a mask harassed another person, regardless of that person’s identity.
The bill would also place additional penalties on a crime if it is considered to have been committed out of hate for a particular group. High-level felonies, like murder and arson, would now be charged as hate crimes if they were motivated by bias — a change that Bare, of the state’s attorney’s office, said is “long overdue.”
“If God forbid there were a mass shooting in Connecticut … state law enforcement would not be able to charge and prosecute the mass killings as hate crimes,” UConn’s Wilson said. “Victims from mass shootings in other states reported feeling retraumatized in cases where the shooter is motivated by hate, but a hate crime is not charged.”
For Class A felonies, which include murder or sexual assault of a minor, the proposed law would impose a mandatory 25-year sentence that cannot be reduced by a judge. Other hate crimes have mandatory minimum fines and sentences that already exist in Connecticut law.
But Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, said he was concerned that, having mandatory minimum sentences, prosecutors would allow plea bargains that would decrease the charges and eliminate its designation as a hate crime.
“Committing a crime against somebody solely for who they are is a very specific level of evil, in my opinion, in my experience,” said Howard. “I am concerned that the mandatory minimums are setting up a scenario where deals will be made to avoid that.”
Both Winfield and Rep. Steven Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, questioned whether the bill was ready to be considered on the floor of the legislature.
“It seems like the language we have before us is a first step, but are there unintended consequences to it, and are there broader policy discussions or issues … that really can and should be fleshed out?” said Stafstrom.
“Clearly, there’s more work to do,” Winfield told CT Mirror. “ When you have the Democrats or Republicans and the public agreeing that there are things that need to be fixed, it would be wise to listen to that.”