Author: Michael Rushford

On November 14, 1996 Alan Peterson, a Southern California contractor, was leaving a Jack in the Box with his lunch when 16-year-old gang member Lawrence Cottle shot him in the chest while attempting to carjack his pickup.  A short time later Peterson died in the hospital.  The next day Cottle robbed a man at gunpoint,  then held his gun to the head of a little girl while stealing her mother’s purse.  Cottle ended his crime spree with an armed carjacking before crashing into a police car while attempting to flee.  For these crimes Cottle was sentenced to life without parole (LWOP).  In May of last year, Alan Peterson’s daughter learned that her father’s murderer was eligible for release on parole and would go before the parole board in June.  She was devastated to learn that California has passed a law (SB 394) making murderers under 18 sentenced to LWOP eligible for parole after serving 25 years.  Dozens of other families have gone through the same trauma of learning that the murderers of their loved ones have been set free under this law.   A committee of the Virginia Senate has just passed out a bill (SB 842) that would make all murderers and all violent criminals eligible for release after serving 15 years.

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If a pipeline owned by Dow Chemical or Chevron had leaked toxins that caused the death of 1,000 Americans in a single year, the entire force of the U.S. Government would have descended upon them, immediately shutting down the operation, followed by federal criminal charges being filed by the Justice Department.  It would not matter at all what political party controlled the White House or Congress.    Yet in 2021 toxic chemicals manufactured in China and sold to Mexican drug cartels who put them into pills that appear to be widely-prescribed drugs such and Xanax and Adderall.  These pills were trafficked across the U.S. southern border and ended up in every American city.  That year 70,000 people in the U.S. were poisoned by the fentanyl in those pills or by cocaine laced with the drug.  For perspective, 58,209 Americans were killed over the 19 years of the Vietnam War.  In the face of this massacre, did the federal government shut down the southern border?  Did the President and his State Department sanction China or Mexico for this crime?  Did Congress take any decisive action?

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The Oklahoma Department of Corrections has denied a condemned murderer’s request to have his spiritual advisor with him in the death chamber during his execution Thursday.  Sean Murphy of the Associated Press reports that Rev. Jeff Hood of Arkansas will not be allowed to be with double-murderer Scott Eizember during the lethal injection process because of his multiple arrests for anti-death penalty outbursts.  Attorneys representing Eizember filed a lawsuit Monday to stop the execution until Hood is allowed in the death chamber.  They cite the U.S. Supreme Court’s March 2022 ruling in Ramirez v. Collier which announced that state’s were required to allow a murderer’s spiritual advisor to be physically present in the death chamber.  Whether this requirement includes allowing anti-death penalty activists who may use the execution as a protest opportunity is yet to be determined.  UPDATE:  Oklahoma relented and allowed Rev. Hood to be in the death chamber as Eizember was executed yesterday, as reported by CBS News.

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Shootings along with homicide rates in most large cities have increased significantly since the national crime surge accompanying the George Floyd riots.  While anti-second amendment democrat politicians including the President, the Mayor of New York City, California’s Governor and Attorney General are focused on “gun crimes” by criminals as justification to increase restrictions on gun ownership by the law-abiding public, knife crimes are not receiving the same level of political attention.  The seriousness of knife attacks was highlighted in a series of early 2022 fatal stabbings of young women beginning in January 12, when a repeat felon walked into a high-end furniture store in the very expensive Los Angeles neighborhood of Hancock Park and fatally stabbed Briana Kupfer, a college student working there.  The autopsy report indicated that Kupfer suffered from 26 stab wounds, eleven of which were to the 24-year-old’s chest.  Kupfer was also stabbed in her abdomen, pelvis, arms, and legs.

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A North Carolina man facing trial for murdering a little boy made a plea-bargain today to avoid a possible death sentence.  Andrew Mark Miller of Fox News reports that Darius Sessoms plead guilty to the August 2020 murder of five-year-old Cannon Hinnant, in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole (LWOP).  The murder occurred when Sessoms walked up to the little boy as he was riding his bike in front of his home and shot him in the head at point-blank range.  Both of the child’s sisters witnessed the murder.  There is no known motive for the crime and the victim’s father told reporters that he considered Sessoms a friend to his family.  This plea deal would not have been available in a states which do not have a death penalty.

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When she commuted of death sentences for every condemned murderer in Oregon last week, outgoing Governor Kate Brown may have given the state’s worst murderers the opportunity for parole.  An article in CNS News by Hans Bader reports that murderers who killed their victims before 1989, the year that the state adopted true life without parole (LWOP) as the alternative to a death sentence, can petition for parole because they are not eligible for LWOP.   The state’s other thirteen condemned murderers could become eligible for release under the state’s Second Chance Law.  The Oregonian reports that the law (SB 819) was adopted last year to give prison inmates a pathway to early release.  The measure was promoted by progressives who believe that no criminal should serve more than 20 years behind bars regardless of their crime.  Governor Brown signed that bill into law.

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A group of five domestic terrorists were arrested Tuesday at a rural site in Atlanta.  Mark Miller of Fox News reports that police found explosive devices, gasoline and road flares.  All five were charged with domestic terrorism, criminal trespass and four were charged with aggravated assault.  Were these members of the dreaded QAnon, or the Proud Boys, the “domestic terrorist” groups targeted by the U.S. Department of Justice and vilified in the national media?  Nope, they are college-aged progressive anti-police activists who have been spiking trees, throwing Molotov cocktails at police, setting fires and carjacking among other crimes to stop the construction of a police training center.  The members of Stop Cop City claim they are also protecting the environment and have been living in trees adjacent to the site.  It is a sad fact that these anarchists are the product of the “woke” counterculture that is well established in colleges and universities, the national media, the federal and many state and local governments, entertainment, social media and too many U.S. corporations.