On May 13 and 14, 2008, major Connecticut media outlets described how a prisoner was stomped to death in MacDougall Correctional Institution’s lunchroom. It was quick and awful—and the guards could not get to the melee fast enough to stop it. After learning about this human tragedy, I felt heavy hearted for two reasons. First, after visiting MacDougall regularly for almost 17 years, I felt sadness for the institution’s correctional officers. I have watched how, with every coming year, staffing and support resources have been diminished. These creeping cutbacks have kept committed officers from fulfilling all the correctional skills for which they were trained. As that happens, the officer morale goes down and prisoner lockdown time goes up. Second, I have a close friend who eats in that prison lunchroom. He is also housed in a ‘‘pod’’ that is reserved for high-security prisoners, mostly killers. My friend has observed numerous explosive situations on his pod. When they happen, he has been known to cower in a corner or hurry to his cell door, hoping that none of the violence will spread to him. His name is Richard Lapointe. By all of the letters of the law that have been applied to his case, my friend is believed to be a raging, highly athletic killer. He has been deemed so bad by the courts that he is living out a sentence he can never complete—life without parole plus 60 years. Those of us who know him and care about him swear that he is a soft little man who is far from athletic. He does not have a mean bone in his body. He is a 63-year-old, 5940, pudgy man with an upand-down thickness that even includes his head. He wears thick glasses and hearing aids. He grew up in Hartford, Connecticut’s Charter Oaks Housing Projects where the other kids nicknamed him ‘‘Mr. Magoo.’’ For many, he became the object of taunts and tricks, but the kids living close by sensed his vulnerability and they became his protectors. Lapointe has an intellectual disability called Dandy-Walker syndrome. Anyone understanding this syndrome knows that a portion of the vermis, the tissue connecting the cerebellum to the temporal lobes of the brain, is missing. He has undergone five brain surgeries that were needed to shunt excessive fluid pressure from expanding his skull and damaging his brain. No clinician diagnosed this dilemma until he was 15 years old. He likes to walk, but he never runs. If he gets up or stops too fast, he experiences dizziness that he calls ‘‘a rush.’’ He has a hard time tackling abstract problems, but he is a whiz at seeing his world in concrete terms and relying on authority persons to help him fill in the blanks. He, in his concrete way, is forever worrying about how much snack money he has or does not have in his commissary account. At other times, he good naturedly voices an avalanche of puns that his mother taught him, rote style, after he was expelled from the Hartford public schools. As for his reliance on authority figures, police officers were always at the top of that list. As a dishwasher in Manchester restaurants, he enjoyed chatting with police when they stopped in for a meal or cup of coffee. That is why, when Lapointe was picked up for questioning by the Manchester police on July 4, 1989, he became putty in their hands. The first interrogator took him into a room and immediately accused Lapointe of savagely raping and murdering Bernice Martin, the grandmother of Lapointe’s wife, in her tiny Manchester apartment. Lapointe never believed that a policeman would lie to him like that. After perhaps an hour of interrogation, the detective printed in large block letters, ‘‘ON MARCH 8, 1987, I WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR BERNICE MARTIN’S DEATH AND IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. MY MIND WENT BLANK.’’ Although Lapointe could not read, he signed the confession. INTELLECTUAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES VOLUME 47, NUMBER 2: 147–148 | APRIL 2009
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Sep 6, 2016
Ami B Bhatt 
Open Access