The religious holiday at the end of the week will push the General Assembly’s vote on post-Newtown issues into April. Legislative leaders expressed concern last week that they weren’t being given enough information about the investigation into the murder of 20 children and six educators that took place more than three months ago.
Senate President Donald Williams said leaders from both parties met with State’s Attorney Stephen Sedensky for about an hour last week and had the opportunity to ask him questions. Those questions did not yield any new information, he said Monday.
“We weren’t being presented with information. We weren’t being given answers,” he said.
However, Williams said Sedensky indicated that search warrant documents will be publicly available by Thursday morning.
“When warrants were issued to search Adam Lanza’s mother’s home, to search the automobile, the vehicle he drove to the school, and to search any other jurisdictions, there would be information concerning what the police found at those sites that will be coming out later this week,” he said.
Although Williams said he didn’t believe the information in the warrants would “measurably change” the bipartisan negotiations on a legislative response to the Sandy Hook shooting, he said leaders have agreed to wait until at least next week to vote on legislation.
“If there’s a 10 percent chance that there’s some significant new piece of information that could impact our policy, and we’re really talking about waiting a week, then it makes a lot of sense,” he said.
Williams said he wasn’t sure what the process for the release of the warrants would be, but said as soon as lawmakers had copies they would make them available to reporters. He expected leaders to begin meeting again on Tuesday and hoped lawmakers would be voting on a legislative package next week.
The group of legislative leaders started meeting to craft the legislation on March 7. They have met almost every day since.