Anthony Brunetti said he has been busy during the quarter century he spent behind bars.
He earned an associate’s degree in theology, wrote a book, completed a course in paralegal studies and is housed in the H.O.N.O.R unit at Cheshire Correctional Institute, where he started a program focused on conversations about criminal justice reform and advocacy to the state legislature, he told The Connecticut Mirror in an email.
In 2023, he went before a judge in Milford to request that the 60-year sentence he’d been given for murder be reduced to 25 years.
“My lawyer and everyone who spoke on my behalf did an excellent job. I had no opposition from the victim’s family or any advocate that could have spoken on their behalf. My rehabilitation was acknowledged by the prosecutor, she did her job in opposing the modification, but she did not push too hard in her opposition,” he told the CT Mirror in an email.
But ultimately, the judge denied his request. His family, he said, was “heartbroken.”
Under current law, Brunetti has to wait five years before he can apply again for a sentence modification. But a bill under consideration in the judiciary committee would reduce that time to two years.
Brunetti was one of nearly 200 people who filed written testimony in support of a bill that would expand opportunities for incarcerated people to have their sentences modified. Many of those were family members and acquaintances of people behind bars, as well as incarcerated individuals themselves. They wrote that they and their loved ones were not the same people they had been 12 or 15 or 20 years ago — they had earned diplomas and participated in rehabilitation programs.
The proposal is a follow-up to a law passed in 2021 that allowed people who were sentenced in a trial, or who received a sentence of less than seven years under a plea deal, to apply for a reduction to their sentence.
Randal Chinnock, founder of the CT Second Look Sentencing Project, said that young people in particular often commit crimes impulsively. But people can change significantly over the course of decades in prison.
“The whole idea of a second look is to allow a court to evaluate who that person is now,” said Chinnock. “What’s been their disciplinary record in prison? Have they helped mentor other inmates? Have they taken advantage of educational, vocational opportunities? And how do they present themselves? Are they still a risk to society if they were to be released is the ultimate question to be answered.”
Other states have passed or are considering sentence modification laws for certain incarcerated people, although Connecticut’s is the broadest. Delaware, Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, North Dakota and Oregon allow for sentence reviews for people who committed a crime while under the age of 18. Illinois, New York and Oklahoma allow sentence reviews for victims of domestic violence. California allows sentence reviews for military veterans or if the review is recommended by certain state officials.
The bill would remove the requirement for the state’s attorney to approve any modifications to sentences of seven years or more that were made under a plea deal. It also would allow judges to reduce sentences that were made under mandatory minimums, which affect around 70 crimes, including murder, kidnapping, sexual assault, human trafficking, burglary, possessing child pornography, manufacturing or selling narcotics and other drugs and certain firearms offenses.
Chinnock told the Black and Puerto Rican caucus earlier this month that those two groups — incarcerated people serving seven years or more under plea deals, and those serving mandatory minimum sentences — affect about a quarter of everyone in the prison system, or about 1,500 people.
Chinnock told CT Mirror that many states implemented mandatory minimums during the 1980s and ’90s when crime was rising. The federal government was also imposing mandatory minimums during the same period, particularly around drug offenses, gun crimes and child exploitation. Connecticut began reforming its mandatory minimums in 2000, and in 2015, the legislature did away with mandatory minimums for low-level drug crimes.
“The rationale is that judges shouldn’t have their hands tied at sentencing by a mandatory minimum requirement. It doesn’t allow them to adequately consider extenuating circumstances,” he said.
He added that state’s attorneys will sometimes decline to allow the sentence modification.
“ Under our current system, prosecutors and state’s attorneys have incentives to seek convictions and long sentences and to not have those sentences changed with the premise of finality,” he said. “ But … if the person isn’t the same person many years later than they were when they were sentenced, what does finality mean?”
During a public hearing on Monday, Gaylord Salters, who received a sentence modification in 2022 after serving 20 years of a 24-year sentence, told lawmakers that while the state’s attorney’s office “has taken commendable steps to review my case,” it was the 2021 sentence modification law that ultimately allowed him to return home in 2022.
Salters said that he worked hard during his prison term and “was able to achieve significant personal development” within prison. He started his own company and published a book. But he said it was “disheartening” that he was only able to request a shorter sentence two decades after entering prison.
“Many individuals remaining incarcerated who pose minimal risks to society are still ineligible for sentence modification due to a lack of consent from the state’s attorney’s office or because they are serving under mandatory minimums,” said Salters, who maintains his innocence.
Salters said not everyone should have their sentences modified, but he said that, for people who had sentences that were longer than a decade, reaching what he called a “point of growth” would be “almost natural” as long as the person wanted to better themselves.
“You have to work towards that road to redemption, but I think it’s significant to put forward that road to redemption so that an individual has the opportunity to follow it,” he said.
In 2022, Connecticut judges granted 132 of 436 requested sentence modifications. In 2023, judges granted 154 of 544 requests, and last year, 171 of 810 requests were granted, according to data from the Judicial Branch.
Rep. Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford, said he opposed the proposal. He told CT Mirror in an email that it was difficult to be convicted of a crime in Connecticut, and that those who did had been sentenced according to the legal process.
“While I do not want to see anyone serve time, nobody does so in Connecticut today without a finding of probable cause, a conviction and sentence. It is really hard to be convicted of anything here in Connecticut,” he wrote. “What this bill does is it permits a convicted person to challenge the length of their sentence the same day it is imposed, with no condition predicate to the filing. Meanwhile, innocent people are looking for their day in court to prove their innocence. This bill does nothing to advance the interests of the law-abiding, and certainly not the victims of crime.”
But the largest opposition to the bill by far was around a provision lowering the waiting period for incarcerated people whose applications were rejected to refile from five years to two years.
Natasha Pierre, the state’s Victim Advocate, said reducing the time between sentence modification proposals could force victims of crimes to have to respond to an application every two years. She added that allowing changes to mandatory minimum sentences “completely fails to recognize the prosecution process before it.”
“Perhaps it is time to step back and evaluate the number of post-conviction opportunities that impact the sentence or release from prison that are currently available to defendants to ensure that the opportunities do not overlap and cause unintentional harm to crime victims,” she said.
Chief State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin also objected to the change, saying it would “undermine the rights of victims, reduce offender accountability, and negatively impact community trust in the criminal justice system.”
He also agreed with Fishbein, saying that changing the sentence that a trial judge had imposed, which he said often occurred “following lengthy and protracted plea negotiations or trial,” would “undermine public confidence in sentencing and the criminal justice system generally.”
Jack Doyle, the state’s attorney for the New Haven district, said he was concerned about having to repeatedly reach out to victims, knowing that some of them had experienced trauma.
“ I can personally tell you that I’ve had to call victims on serious matters of which somebody is serving a sentence modification, only to have … comments such as, ‘Again? I was just before the parole board last week. I was just there for a commutation a couple years ago,’” he said.
He also expressed reservations about the pressure that additional sentence modification cases would place on the state’s attorney’s office. He noted that the number of sentence modification applications his office had received in the last few years had increased “exponentially.”
John Daly, the Chief Public Defender, told CT Mirror that the Public Defender’s Office would do its best to “absorb” any additional costs for services to incarcerated people applying for sentence modifications that might need public defender representation.
“ We’re certainly in support of anything that gives somebody an opportunity to have a review of some kind,” said Daly.
Salters and Chinnock said separately that they believe five years was just too big a gap between opportunities to have a sentence modified. Salters said those five years also represented another stretch of time where an incarcerated person has to “maintain his composure” in a place “filled with violence and chaos.”
“Five years inside prison before you have another chance is an awfully long time that that person may have loved ones outside, may have children outside, may have ill parents,” Chinnock said. “And I think that this five years, and even three years, is just too long to wait for them to have another chance.”