The initial development of laws and courts to process the colonial response to crime happened between 1630 and 1700. Connecticut consistently adapted that judicial foundation in the evolution from a colony to a state. A second milestone occurred with the transformation from county workhouses into county jails. A third, and most notorious, milestone passed in 1773, when Connecticut refitted a defunct copper mine into its first prison facility, Newgate Prison. Named after an infamous prison in London (and originally spelled New Gate), the facility confined offenders in underground caverns. The place rapidly earned an international reputation as a throwback to Europe’s dungeons. Newgate’s celebrity status for its savagery provided a major provocation for Connecticut’s first true prison reform movement early in the nineteenth century, our fourth milestone. The carefully thought-out construction of a “modern” prison for Connecticut in 1827 also drew international attention, this time of a positive sort. Wethersfield State Prison marked a significant step forward in the development of an organized, deliberative approach to penology.
The formation of Connecticut’s first police forces in the urban areas of Connecticut in the late nineteenth century serves as our final milestone. Along with the laws designating who was eligible for arrest, police discretion in enforcing those regulations hugely influenced the tone as well as the substance of justice that emerged in Connecticut.
MILESTONE 1: CONNECTICUT’S FIRST LAWS, COURTS, AND WORKHOUSES
When they arrived in America, the early New England colonists of the 1620s brought with them several resources to achieve their goal of establishing an exemplary community of faith and order wherever they settled in the new land. Although differing in important ways, Connecticut derived much of its basic approach to criminal justice from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The first resource was the Bible, which supplied a multifaceted religious history of ethical regulations, moral commandments, and proverbial wisdom about how to maintain a faithful, safe, and orderly community. Biblical law was the filter through which the colonists poured their long experience with the upper-class law and societal mores they had left behind. Their memories and experiences with English common law were also resources. The common law had not always been kind to the Puritans and other immigrants, especially in the Crown’s response to religious dissent. The fact that royal supervision was spotty at best, and too often yielded arbitrary decisions, increased the odds of running afoul of the common law. In general, common law worked well enough to hold the nation together and provide at least theoretical limits to royal prerogative. The colonists used the most functional and productive aspects as they adapted to their new, and very different, environment.
Relationships with those in England who had funded the Puritan emigration were still strong, despite the fact that over three thousand miles of ocean separated them. In the absence of trained lawyers and other legal experts, each of New England’s colonies utilized various parts of the unwritten common law to construct legal foundations. The results in the different colonies were practical laws to maintain order, courts to process offenders, and workhouses in which to temporarily hold debtors and those convicted of moral lapses or crimes.
The colonies were separated from one another as well as from England. Consequently, each town, as well as each colony, structured itself according to its own needs and abilities. According to legal historian Lawrence Friedman, “There were as many colonial systems as there were colonies…. Throughout the colonial period, the colonists borrowed as much English law as they wanted to take or were forced to take.”1
For example, twenty-two of the regulations in Robert Ludlow’s Code of 1650 were taken, almost without change, from the code of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and six other laws were borrowed from other sources in the older colony. Fourteen regulations of the Connecticut code were original. Written colonial laws constituted a pattern quite different from English common law, which was rarely codified. “The first codes of the colonies were fresh-start codes … designed to put limits around potential abuses of power in a barely structured society.”2
It is easy to ridicule the laws drawn up in the early codes as unconstitutional or for behaviors taken for granted today as personal matters. In a society, however, that was struggling to survive, such codes provided a framework that church and political leaders thought essential to maintain order. They had learned in England that relying on the benevolence or the good judgment of the king or those acting on behalf of the Crown resulted in judgments based on whim, personal bias, or national considerations. A government of laws, not persons, was required by the Bible and by their experience. The fact that decisions based on whim and bias were not eliminated was taken to prove the doctrine of original sin and the need for checks and balances in the application of the law. Colonial codes laid the foundation for the American version of democracy.
For the first few years the colonists depended on parental enforcement and frequent sermons to assure compliance with the laws. When these tactics proved insufficient, public shame was utilized, with English stocks and pillories. As long as corporal punishment was the norm, with the death penalty as the ultimate retribution through the end of the eighteenth century, any extensive use of jails was unnecessary. Capital punishment was actually used sparingly, applied only for murder, treason, and, for a brief time, witchcraft. Connecticut, not known for breaking new ground very often, focused on strengthening the moral fiber of its members against the devil.
Hartford was the setting for the first person executed in the colonies for witchcraft. Eleven people (ten women, one man) were convicted as witches in the Connecticut Colony between 1647 and 1663. All were hanged. The convictions of three more, charged in 1665, 1668, and 1692, were reversed.3
The difference was the demand by Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr. and a colleague, Gershom Bulkeley, that Connecticut abide by the rule of law that required confirmation of witchcraft by independent witnesses rather than emotional testimonies of those making the charges. Both men were steeped in the new scientific worldview created by the Enlightenment, a viewpoint that was open to new ideas and that looked for evidence, not emotional conviction, in the search for justice and truth. The two also studied alchemy and other novel branches of science. Winthrop was in a key position to bring the witchcraft frenzy to a halt in Connecticut.4
The death penalty became increasingly problematic in the colonies. Memories of its overuse in England provided one deterrent. A second factor was the obvious evidence that the penalty did not stop the crimes when it was applied. A third was the solemn fact that repentance was impossible once the death penalty was administered. Even in the application of corporal punishments, the goal was to chastise the offender in the hope that conversion to a better life was achieved.
The Connecticut Colony also emulated the Massachusetts Bay court structure, electing a general court at the top of the legal hierarchy. County courts, created in 1668, were subordinate to the general court. The office of the magistrate (also called the justice of the peace in England) was a local official, not necessarily an attorney, in the cities and towns and was at the bottom of the hierarchy. Decisions in many instances could be appealed to the general court, which had the final say. In 1638 the general court established a particular court in Connecticut to be the principal judicial body of the state.
Sixty years later the general court was renamed the Connecticut General Assembly and the modern terminology of the separation of powers was initiated. In 1662 Gov. John Winthrop Jr. used his ability to persuade his personal and family contacts in England to obtain a charter for Connecticut that gave the state almost complete freedom to govern itself, a unique situation among the thirteen colonies. Based on that charter, two new levels of courts were established: the court of assistants in 1665 and the county courts three years later. Separate probate courts were established in 1698 to handle such matters as wills and estates. A superior court was established in 1711. A supreme court of errors was established in 1784 and was renamed the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1965.
Connecticut became notable in several ways
