Confessed killer from Stonington goes to law school

You can file this story under the category of people from southeastern Connecticut who end up in the news somewhere else, for some strange reason.

In this category, one of my favorites has always been the guy from North Stonington who was murdered on a plantation he owned in Thailand, in a hit allegedly ordered by his wife.

And now we have Bruce S. Reilly, formerly of Stonington, a graduate of Stonington High School, making headlines recently as a first-year student at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans.

It's not Reilly's grades or conduct at the school, which he is attending with the help of two generous scholarships, which have put him in the news. It is his past that is haunting him.

Reilly, who is now 38, was arrested on murder charges in 1993, when he was a theater student at Emerson College in Boston. He was charged with beating and stabbing to death a Community College of Rhode Island professor.

The professor was found dead in his West Greenwich, R.I., home. Police said the professor picked up Reilly when he was hitchhiking and that a sexual encounter preceded the beating and murder.

Reilly was also charged with stealing the professor's credit card and car.

The story of the murder and Reilly's arrest all rattled into the news recently in New Orleans, apparently after Reilly discovered people were Googling him and learning about his arrest and prison term.

He confessed to it on a blog, which has since been taken down but was widely reported on in the Louisiana news media and on websites related to lawyers and law schools.

Reilly also reportedly posted a picture of a T-shirt that said, "(Expletive) Google, ask me."

"We live in a passive-aggressive culture of curiosity and fear. The former is an admirable trait while the latter is what allows us to be controlled," Reilly wrote in his blog. "Let's cut to the chase: I killed a man 19 years ago."

Naturally this sparked a lot of discussion around the Tulane campus, where not only Reilly's attendance, but the school's scholarship policies, were debated.

I especially liked this description of the Tulane discussion, which appeared on the abovethelaw.com website, attributed to a tipster: "Your article on Bruce Reilly has stirred quite the tempest down here at Tulane: a small mossy cluster of students typically found speed-typing, whispering and tittering in a darkened corner of the library began typing, whispering and tittering even faster."

Reilly, who had some minor scrapes with law enforcement here before going away to college, eventually pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and served a 12-year prison sentence.

The charges in Connecticut included some motor vehicle offenses, procuring liquor by a minor and failure to appear in court.

After his release from prison, Reilly became active in a prisoner rights organization and has written extensively on the topic. Greedy corporations and society's prosecution of young men of color on drug charges are frequent targets of his writing.

"There needs to be accredited education so that real resumes can be built, and formerly incarcerated people can enter the world with earning potential in their primary working years," Reilly wrote on one blog posting.

I tend to agree with some of the Tulane students who were quoted as saying that Reilly should be free to pursue any career, even the law, once he has served his time. Shouldn't that be the aim of the system? Isn't that rehabilitation?

I was more surprised, though, that Reilly was made to serve only 12 years, after pleading no contest to what sounded like a pretty brutal killing.

Maybe that's what remains on the minds of some of those other Tulane students - how recent it all was - as they busily type, whisper and titter.

This is the opinion of David Collins