by Laura Glesby The New Haven independent
“To the victim, justice is a guilty verdict,” said defense attorney Michael Moscowitz. “Justice to the defendant is a not guilty verdict.”
He was speaking aloud the logic of an adversarial criminal justice system, a system in which trials are either won or lost.
The entire room of attendees in front of him — from prosecutors to defense lawyers, from formerly incarcerated people to surviving family members of victims — seemed to reject that logic in murmured dissent.
Moscowitz articulated that definition of justice at a community dialogue with prosecutors and defense lawyers Thursday evening hosted at Hamden’s Whitneyville Cultural Commons by Stop Solitary CT. The event drew an audience of 25 criminal justice advocates, most of whom had spent years either living behind bars or visiting loved ones behind bars.
Toward the end of the discussion Shakur Collins stood up to ask the panel of prosecutors and defense lawyers to define their vision of justice.
By way of a preface, Collins said, “I take full responsibility for the crime that I committed 49 days after my 18th birthday” — the 2003 murder of 44-year-old Kenneth Bugbee. He said he came home nine months ago after 22 years in prison.
His sentence was originally 29 years, he said, but he was released early due to a sentence commutation and parole. During that time, he committed himself to his own education, earning a college degree from Wesleyan University.
At Collins’ early release hearing before the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles in November 2024, prosecutor Jackie McMahon argued against his parole. “Her logic is what scares me,” he told Griffin and the other panelists on Thursday night.
After delving into the details of Collins’ crime, she echoed a statement she said she heard from Bugbee’s sister: that if released after the full commuted sentence of 25 years, Collins would be “approximately the same age” as Bugbee upon leaving prison.
“That has a type of poetic justice to it: that he would get to begin his life again at the age Kenneth was when his life was so brutally taken from him,” McMahon had said.
Collins described being bothered by that part of McMahon’s speech — “quantifying justice in this poetic fashion,” rather than a “restorative” approach grounded in the human experiences at stake. “I’m not saying everybody’s going to get it right. We’re flawed. But I’m worried if this is the kind of logic being presented in front of people who have the power to change people’s lives, that’s a slippery slope.”
So he posed an open question to the panel: “What is justice, and how do you quantify it?”
Chief State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin answered first.
“Justice is different depending on what side of the aisle you sit on,” he said. “Justice to you is different than justice for the family” of the man Collins killed.
“You did harm to the community,” Griffin added.
“For sure,” Collins nodded.
So justice should depend on “a holistic look at an individual,” Griffin argued. “I assume from the manner in which you asked the question that you’re not the same young man that took the life of that man. That you recognize that you did tremendous harm to this community and to the family. And that you spent a lot of time in prison on self-reflection, and healing, and now you’re coming out and doing what you think is best for the community. That looks like justice to me.”
The room applauded.
“The thing is, I am not the exception to the rule,” Collins replied. “I know men who are still in there because of this logic about what justice is. And that’s dangerous. This perpetuates the violence.”
Defense lawyer Chris DeMarco added to Collins, “You were 18 when this happened. There’s so much research now, scientific evidence, that the male brain doesn’t fully develop until the age of 25.”
He turned to the chief state’s attorney. “Pat, you say he’s not the same guy as he was at 18. I think at 30 years old he wasn’t the same guy he was at 18.”
DeMarco called for the judicial system to take into account how much a person can change between 18 and 25. “It’s hard being an 18 year old young man without the proper resources,” he said. “Shit goes sideways fast. You’ve done something and all of a sudden you’re looking at 22 years in prison for an instant. And I’m not saying you didn’t do bad shit beforehand, maybe you did some bad shit, but all of a sudden it really went sideways on you. … So how do you treat a 19, 20-year-old man who’s made a terrible mistake?”
That question may be hardest to answer when the victim’s family “doesn’t want you to get out at all,” DeMarco said. “I don’t have an answer.”
Top state prosecutor Patrick Griffin and defense lawyer Michael Moscowitz.
At that, Moscowitz chimed in. “You asked what justice is. To the victim, justice is a guilty verdict,” he said. “Justice to the defendant is a not guilty verdict. That’s as simple as you can get.”
“No, I don’t agree with that,” responded Collins, amid similar replies from the audience disagreeing with both sides of that statement.
“I don’t agree that justice for a defendant is a not guilty verdict,” echoed DeMarco.
Meanwhile, Stop Solitary CT director Barbara Fair noted, “There’s cases where the victim also is not the one looking for a 50-year sentence. It’s the prosecutor who’s looking for it.”
She recalled meeting one woman who wound up advocating for her son’s killer to be released from prison. “She recognized that her son was involved in the stuff on the street, and that’s what helped to cause his death… That’s when she began to forgive the other person who took her son’s life,” Fair said. “This young man killed her only child. She ended up fighting to get him out.”
Another audience member spoke about a cycle of violence within her family. Imprisoning the family member who killed another loved one “would never have brought him back,” she said.
If justice for a defendant isn’t often a not guilty verdict, the defense lawyers on the panel made clear at other points in the conversation that justice isn’t always a guilty verdict either.
They described a slow court system in which criminal cases can drag on for years. Defendants who can’t afford bond within Connecticut’s cash bail system feel extra pressure to plead guilty, argued Moscowitz. “The tendency is, you’re gonna plead guilty to get yourself out if you can’t make bond,” he said.
“The Division of Criminal Justice is open to this debate,” Griffin said regarding whether to end the cash bond system, “but I don’t know yet what the system is going to be.”
Collins asked Griffin about the notion of restorative justice. “What I’m asking doesn’t start with you, nor does it end with you,” he said. Still, he pressed the top state prosecutor: “What can you commit to?”
He said that he aims to better set up defendants in “lower court,” facing largely non-violent charges, for success upon leaving the courtroom.
“What we’re not doing in those courts is addressing the underlying reasons that bring an individual to court — which is mental health, substance abuse, dual diagnoses,” Griffin said.
“Once an individual shoots someone, rehabilitation is gonna take a bit of time,” he said, arguing that “it’s the low-level offenses” that the state should target for prison diversion efforts. He pointed to the Division of Criminal Justice’s Early Screening and Intervention program that refers qualifying defendants to treatment programs.
More broadly, Griffin said, “We will look at each case individually and attempt to fashion our recommendations based upon the evidence that’s presented to us and a picture of the individual.”
The crowd Thursday night.