About Those Compassionate COVID Releases — Update

In my post here, I discussed a “compassionate” COVID release of a defendant who didn’t waste a whole lot of time thereafter murdering the woman he raped and who was going to testify against him.  As it turns out, this “compassionate” release cost more than one life.

Paul Mirengoff has the updated version in “Our Under-Incarceration Problem, Violence Against Women Edition”:

Last October, Ibrahim Bouaichi sexually assaulted Karla Dominguez with whom he reportedly had been in a relationship. He was charged with six felony counts and held without bond in an Alexandria, Virginia jail.

In April, a judge, Nolan Dawkins, ordered the release of Bouaichi due to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Bouaichi was 33 years old. The virus probably posed about the same threat to his health as the flu. Moreover, there had been no cases of the virus at the Alexandria jail.

In other words, Bouaichi, at his age, had minimal risk of suffering any serious ill effects from the virus in the Alexandria jail even if it were present there, which apparently it was not.  Indeed, it was much more prevalent in the Northern Virginia community into which he was released.

Judge Dawkins ordered Bouaichi to stay at home, to leave only to met with his lawyers, and to have no contact with Dominguez, his victim. But the judge did not order electronic monitoring of Bouaichi.

Less than a month after his release, police officers spotted Bouaichi in his car at a Wendy’s drive-through. He rammed his car into one of their cruisers.

For this, he was charged with multiple assault counts and drunk driving. But after spending one night in a Maryland jail, Bouaichi was released on bond.

The pro-criminal unseriousness of the system was breathtaking.  Bouaichi never needed or deserved to be out to start with; he flouted the conditions of his windfall release; assaulted the police in doing so; and was nonetheless almost immediately put back on the street.

Now here’s the grim kicker:

In late July, [the rape victim] was shot to death in Alexandria. The police issued a warrant for the arrest of Bouaichi on the charge of murder. He fled. When the police finally spotted him and moved in for the arrest, he killed himself.

So now, solely on account of this shake-and-jive “compassionate” release, two people are dead  —  people to whom we owed due process of law, at least a shard of decency, and, last but not least, a modicum of sobriety in evaluating the competing risks involved.

But it was not to be.  Thanks to the importuning of Bouaichi’s defense lawyers, and the carefree thoughtlessness of the judge, two people are now needlessly dead.

This was the cost of “COVID release” in a single case.  The overall costs of the many thousands of these things are certain to be far higher, but we never seem to hear about them.  One might ask  —  why not?  The answer is not encouraging.  It’s that those peddling these releases are too partisan, too callous, and, mostly, too dishonest to tell us what the costs are or, indeed, that there will be any costs at all.  I read defense-oriented blogs now and again, and I have yet to hear a single word said about these releases except that we need lots more of them.

If there are costs  —  to rape victims, to their families, to the hope for justice  —  hey, look people, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.  Get over it.  Understand that this is Your Defense Bar At Work.