Is Chicago Next to Wake Up?

by · Feb 13, 2023 10:37 am

In the last few elections, there have been some encouraging signs that voters in major cities are beginning to turn the corner and wake up from the delusions of wokeness. San Francisco booted its criminal-coddling district attorney. New York Democrats nominated the relatively tougher-on-crime candidate for mayor, with the general election being a foregone conclusion. The results have not all been positive, though. Philadelphia voters unwisely reelected their criminal-coddling  DA, and a majority of Californians are so allergic to voting for a Republican that Gov. Newsom’s appointed attorney general sailed into a full term.

On a list of big-city mayors rank-ordered by effectiveness in fighting crime, Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot would be near the bottom. Is Chicagoland ready to give her the boot? Collin Levy explores that possibility in this column in Saturday’s WSJ. Continue reading . . .

The Consequences of Politically-Correct Police Recruitment

by · Feb 7, 2023 1:21 pm

On July 17, 2015 a white police officer shot and killed 19-year-old Darrius Stewart, a black man with outstanding felony warrants, during a traffic stop in Memphis, Tennessee.  The incident was captured on video and made national headlines sparking protests with charges of police racism.  Both the Obama Justice Department and a Memphis Grand Jury declined to charge the officer in the face of evidence that Stewart had attacked the officer before attempting to escape.  In spite of this, the racist stain on the Memphis Police Department resulted in significant changes in the recruitment and training of officers.  Bernard Condon, Jim Mustain and Adrian Sainz of the Associated Press report that these changes included lowering the standards for experience, education and even ignoring prior criminal behavior, in order to recruit more officers.  While the reporters are careful not to say it, these changes were made to put more officers of color on the force.  One of the consequences of this was last month’s killing of Tyre Nichols.

Continue reading . . .

Missouri Quadruple Murderer Facing Execution

by · Feb 6, 2023 3:07 pm

The state of Missouri is set to execute Leonard Taylor for the November 2004 murders of his girlfriend Angela Rowe and her three children.  Jim Salter of the Associated Press reports that Governor Mike Parson today declined to halt Taylor’s execution which is scheduled for tomorrow, February 7.  Taylor, a habitual felon with priors for dealing cocaine, fraud and forcible rape, continues to claim that he is innocent although he admitted the murders to his brother, who shared this with his girlfriend.  The brother has since recanted that testimony.  The victims were believed to have been murdered on November 22 or 23.  Their bodies were discovered on December 3, after Rowe had not shown up for work nor her children for school.  The mother was shot several times.  The 10 year old boy and 6-year-old girl were shot twice in the head.  The 5-year-old boy was shot once in the head.  On November 26, Taylor flew to California under an assumed name to visit his wife.  He was arrested three weeks later in Madisonville, Kentucky at the home of another girlfriend.   The facts are described in a 2009 Missouri Supreme Court decision on direct appeal.  UPDATE:  Taylor was executed without incident at 6:16 PM.

Continue reading . . .

Fresno Cop Dead Thanks to Newsom’s Early Release Plan

by · Feb 1, 2023 3:24 pm

In 2016, Governor Jerry Brown and progressive billionaire George Soros pooled just over $10 million to fool the public into passing Proposition 57, the so-called “Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act.”  While it was billed as providing well-behaved non-violent felons with a means to gain early release from prison, District Attorneys warned that it would give the state department of corrections unbridled authority to release inmates with multiple violent prior convictions.  Two years later a Los Angeles appeals court and a Sacramento judge ruled that this warning was correct.  In May of last year Governor Newsom’s appointed head of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) announced new regulations giving over 70,000 prison inmates the opportunity for early release.  A CJLF lawsuit to block these unconstitutional regulations has been dragging through the courts  since last Summer.  On Tuesday,  January 31, a police officer in the small farming town of Selma was shot and killed by gang member sentenced last March to five years in prison for several felonies.  He was released last November after serving seven months.

Continue reading . . .

Sheriff Asks Newsom to Allow Death Penalty for Cartel Murderers

by · Jan 31, 2023 2:48 pm

On Monday Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux asked California Governor Gavin Newsom to lift his moratorium on the death  penalty for the members of the drug gang that executed six people including a 16-year-old mother and her 10-month-old son.  The Sacramento Bee reports that during a press conference yesterday the Sheriff told reporters “I would like him (Newsom) to lift the ban on the death penalty in cases where small children are murdered.  This should be a death penalty case.”  All of the victims in the January 16 murders were members of the same family.  The Sheriff said that the killings were a “cartel-style execution,” likely involving a criminal gang distributing drugs for a Mexican cartel.

Continue reading . . .

NY Drug Dealer Convicted of Killing Three

by · Jan 31, 2023 1:55 pm

A New York City drug dealer who distributed fentanyl-laced cocaine out of his mother’s Manhattan apartment has been convicted of the 2021 poisoning deaths of three people.  Aaron Katersky of CBS News reports that Billy Ortega faces 25 years-to -life in federal prison for selling the laced cocaine to stockbroker Ross Mitangi, lawyer Amanda Scher and social worker Julia Ghahramari on the same day in March of 2021.  All three died of fentanyl poisoning.  Federal prosecutors proved that Ortega knew that the drugs he was selling were causing overdoses.  He even gave some of the cocaine to another dealer and suggested he test it’s potency telling him, “give it some girls and you let me know…”  In 2021 18,000 American fatally overdosed on fentanyl-laced cocaine.  Fortunately federal law provides a stiff mandatory minimum sentence for this type of crime.

Virginia Law to Punish Victims

by · Jan 26, 2023 2:11 pm

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.

Continue reading . . .

The Poisoning of America

by · Jan 25, 2023 3:53 pm

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.   But when toxic chemicals manufactured in China and sold to Mexican drug cartels are put into pills that appear to be widely-prescribed drugs such and Xanax and Adderall and kill thousands, the government response is mostly crickets.  These pills are trafficked across the U.S. southern border and end up in every American city.  In 2021, 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?

Continue reading . . .

Juvenile Crime Takes Off

by · Jan 24, 2023 11:42 am

In the late 1980s roughly one-third of serious and violent crimes in the U.S. were committed by juveniles under the age of 18.   In the eight years between 1986 and 1994 the number of violent crimes committed by juveniles went from 600,000 to 1.05 million.  A major contributor to the high juvenile crime rate over this period was the emergence of Columbian cocaine smuggled by South American gangs into U.S. and marketed by heavily armed street gangs.  Juveniles made up a significant cohort of the members of these gangs, who were constantly at war with rival gangs over marketing territory.  In large urban centers juvenile gang members played a major role in moving crack-cocaine and punishing rivals.  At that time state laws written in the 1950s to deal with teen-aged joyriders and petty thieves with short stays in Juvenile Hall and rehabilitation programs, were inadequate to deal with hardened 17-year-old drug dealers carrying automatic weapons.  Drive-by shootings, violent carjackings, and murders over a victim’s wristwatch or tennis shoes became regular occurrences in big cities and juveniles were often the perpetrators.

Continue reading . . .

Latzer and Mangual: The Myths of Mass Incarceration and Overpolicing

by · Jan 18, 2023 9:06 pm

Here is a very worthwhile event, available online at the Heritage Foundation. Barry Latzer and Rafael Mangual will speak on the topic above at noon EST on Thursday, January 26. We have quoted both Latzer and Mangual often on this blog. Our friend Cully Stimson is the host.

In criminal justice, as the old saying goes, it’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble; it’s what we know for a fact that just is not so. We can expect Latzer and Mangual to expose many “woke” myths at this event.