No Second Chances for Victims of Repeat Chicago Killer
The mantra of death penalty opponents for all of my adult life has been Blackstone’s ratio: “better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.” But what if one of the guilty allowed to escape is a murderer? William Lee of the Chicago Tribune reports that last month the posterboy for compassionate release, Steven “Mustafa” Hawthorne, was arrested for the double murder of his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. In 1984, Hawthorne was convicted of killing two people and sentenced to life-without-the-possibility-of parole (LWOP). Because he was 17-years-old at the time of the murders, Hawthorne was allowed to petition for re-sentencing after the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in Miller v. Alabama. In 2017, based upon findings that he had been rehabilitated, Hawthorne was released from prison. As noted by Hans Bader in Liberty Unyielding, the sentencing reform group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, celebrated Hawthorne’s release noting that “there are too many people in Illinois serving long prison terms that don’t make communities safer. More of them need the same chance that Steven got.”
Because he was released in Chicago, as Hawthorne’s so-called rehabilitation began to unravel, he was allowed to remain in the community even after being arrested for gun possession in 2020. Soros-backed progressive DA Kim Fox was not going to lock up a black celebrity, released under a policy she vigorously supports, just because he was a convicted murderer in possession of a firearm (a serious felony in most states). Last January Hawthorne was arrested again for possession of five guns including a dreaded AR 15. The arrest occurred during a traffic stop. Progressives are demanding a new policy that prohibits traffic stops in Chicago, patterned on similar bans in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Oakland and Berkeley. In any event, District Attorney Fox again kept Hawthorne on the street.
Then at 1:30 a.m. on April 16, Hawthorne walked into his ex-girlfriend’s home and executed her boyfriend as he slept. The girlfriend managed to run out to the street where Hawthorne chased her down shot her once, then pinned her to the ground and beat her with a pistol. He finally crushed her head with a large rock, all in front of witnesses including the girlfriend’s two daughters, 3 and 5.
Compassion should always be a part of the criminal justice process. When the system was working effectively in the late 1990s, most first-time offenders got second chances and programs to put them on a different path. But if they re-offended, especially with a violent or serious crime, the system provided real consequences. Declining crime rates evidenced the worth of this policy. In the name of “social justice” these policies have been abandoned in most big cities and many blue states. The result is much more crime.
In exchange for the compassion Illinois gave to Steven “Mustafa” Hawthorne, and District Attorney Kim Fox’s choice to put her idiotic social justice politics ahead of enforcing the law, even for a convicted double-murderer, two more innocent people are dead and the lives of two young children are ruined.
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Michael – Just a few points
1. Your quote at the beginning – “better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer” – seems to me to be misplaced. Mr. Hawthorne did spend 34 years in prison for the double slaying in 1983 – I don’t think that is “escaping” punishment at all.
2. We don’t know that Kim Foxx is necessarily responsible for Hawthorne being on the streets after his earlier arrests – blaming everything that goes wrong on one person obfuscates the fact that the chief prosecutor is but one part of the entire criminal justice process.
3. The article you referenced stated that the sentencing judge for the original murders called the mandatory life sentence “excessive” and while hindsight may have proved him wrong the purpose of trying to redeem youth serving long sentences is still a laudable goal.
Brett Miler
Brett: Hawthorne was sentenced to LWOP, not 34 years. By setting him free, the state of Illinois allowed him to escape from the full sentence he received for his first two murders.
In the case of a double murderer, out on parole, who is arrested twice for possession of a firearms, the buck stops at the District Attorney’s desk. There is no way that Fox was not aware of these arrests and did not sign off on allowing him to stay on the street. Current federal law would have put him back in prison for 20 years after the first arrest.
Two innocent lives were brutally ended in pursuit of that “laudable goal.” If any of Hawthorne’s victims had been friends or relatives of yours would you still support the policy that turned him loose? I’m guessing yes.