Las Vegas police capture at-large bomber who used battery acid and dummy to make movie-like prison escape, correctional officers didn't know about jailbreak for days



A Nevada inmate serving a life sentence executed a movie-like prison escape. Correctional officers didn't know that the prisoner made a jailbreak for days. Las Vegas police finally captured the at-large inmate days after he made an unbelievable escape.

Porfirio Duarte-Herrera and his co-defendant Omar Rueda-Denvers were convicted in 2010 after a jury found him guilty of murdering 24-year-old Willebaldo Dorantes Antonio. The men allegedly executed a revenge plot and detonated a pipe bomb on the roof of the Luxor Hotel parking garage in retaliation for Antonio dating Rueda-Denvers' ex-girlfriend.

"Duarte-Herrera has been serving a life sentence after using a motion-activated pipe bomb hidden in a coffee cup to kill a casino hot dog stand worker on the Las Vegas strip in 2007," the Daily Beast reported.

While serving time at the Southern Desert Correctional Center, Duarte-Herrera reportedly used battery acid to break down the window frame of his prison cell. The inmate purportedly created a dummy – possibly made out of cardboard – to fool prison guards.

The convicted bomber was housed in a unit with approximately 200 prisoners and did have a cellmate.

The inmate escaped the medium-security correctional center by slipping past the guards and the prison's perimeter fence.

Paul Lunkwitz – the president of the Fraternal Order of Police Nevada C.O. – told KVVU-TV, "Not only could that tower see the unit, but the tower could see the fence line where the damage was that allowed the inmate to get through."

Lunkwitz said the prison tower had been unmanned for a couple of years.

The Nevada Department of Corrections said in a statement that Duarte-Herrera was officially reported missing at 7 a.m. on Tuesday. However, prison authorities believe that he may have escaped as early as Friday night.

A search was initiated about an hour after he was reported missing from the Southern Desert Correctional Center in Indian Springs.

Then on Thursday morning, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department received a tip and took Duarte-Herrera into custody in downtown Las Vegas after he was on the lam for five days.

Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) said of the prison break, "This is unacceptable. My office has ordered NDOC to conduct and complete a thorough investigation into this event as quickly as possible. This kind of security lapse cannot be permitted and those responsible will be held accountable."

Lunkwitz put some of the jailbreak blame on Sisolak, "He hired the director. He knows how this department is being run. He knows those towers have not been staffed for as long as they haven’t been staffed for, and that’s a legislatively approved budgeted position."

Lunkwitz said, "There are a lot of things that could have been avoided, and a lot of security measures that could take place that isn’t happening primarily due to staffing."

Inmate serving life for fatal Luxor bombing used battery acid, dummy in prison escape, union says www.youtube.com

Horowitz: It’s the violent gun felons, stupid



We need not steal people’s guns without due process, as Joe Biden suggests, nor do we need to send in the National Guard to protect America’s cities, as Donald Trump recently suggested. What Chicago’s experience demonstrates is that we simply need to lock up the gun felons and career criminals who have already been found guilty through due process. It’s not so much about funding the police or drastic measures of having the military occupy American cities, but about simply locking up the criminals.

Americans watched with horror the viral video of a 16-year-old with a gun bust under his belt tussling violently with a NYPD officer on one of Manhattan’s infamous subways. It turns out that the boy had previously been arrested April 12 in Brooklyn for allegedly carrying a loaded gun and then again just two weeks ago for a robbery, but the details of the cases are sealed. Yet despite the history of gun violations and violence, the suspect was released on his own recognizance a day after the struggle with police.

This case embodies the source of the violence in cities like New York and Chicago. The culprits all have endless violations of bail terms and parole, and numerous violent crimes and gun felonies piling up on each other before the original case is disposed of in court, yet they continue to be released, especially in the case of the growing juvenile violence. Any other policy thrown into the public policy discussion other than tougher sentencing, pre-release holding, and tougher parole conditions is a distraction. You can fund police all day long, but if the criminals are not punished, they will just fight with the police knowing there are no repercussions.

“He’s charged with all those things, and now in his third arrest, he’s released again,” a high-ranking police source told the New York Post of the subway brawler. “What does it take to get locked up here?” This incident occurred a week after the man who attacked New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin was freed within a few hours on cashless bail.

Democrats wax poetic about gun violence, but then when they actually catch gun felons illegally possessing guns and committing more crimes in violation of their previous release or parole, they still offer them low bail. A Chicago judge recently released 32-year-old Clear Huddleston on a $3,000 cash deposit after he was caught illegally possessing a gun and drugs, despite his criminal history, which included robbery in 2008, unlawful use of a weapon by a felon in 2012, theft in 2016, and armed robbery in 2016. The way Democrats speak of guns, you would think they’d offer the death penalty to someone caught illegally possessing a gun as a career violent felon, yet even career violent gun felons and robbers are easily released and given multiple “chances.”

Then there is the case of Steven Kelsey, a Chicago man on parole for shooting a man while on electronic monitoring for possessing a firearm while out on parole. So he already had his second chance, despite actually shooting someone with a gun. Now he has been arrested for, you guessed it, an armed carjacking. Before the July 12 carjacking, Kelsey was convicted of illegal gun possession and aggravated discharge of a firearm in a 2015 case that started as an attempted murder case. This is after having been charged as a juvenile twice for possessing stolen motor vehicles and once for aggravated vehicular hijacking. Yet he didn’t serve much time, and shortly after he was paroled for the shooting, Kelsey was arrested again and charged with … you guessed it … unlawful use of a weapon by a felon on parole. But he was released in June of last year with just a $10,000 bail deposit on electronic monitoring, which, as always turned out to be worthless in deterring him from the armed carjacking earlier this month.

This is the story of nearly every carjacker and murderer in every major city, and it’s happening in red states too. Earlier this month, a 15-year old carjacker in Memphis was released from some nebulous juvenile program on electronic monitoring and is now accused of killing a woman in another carjacking, despite wearing an ankle monitor.

Carjackings are out of control as a result of repeat juvenile offenders never getting punished. This phenomenon fueled more than 1,900 carjackings in Chicago last year. At some point, youthful indiscretion should not be an excuse for serious, repeat offenses.

If we only deterred and punished the known career criminals, we’d stop most violent crime. The debate over police funding, while important, is largely a distraction to the main issue. Republicans, including President Trump, bought into the over-incarceration argument last decade, which led to an acceleration in de-incarceration of the most dangerous career criminals. Ironically, Trump himself made the comments about deploying the National Guard to suppress riots at the “America First Policy Institute,” which is run by his former domestic policy adviser Brooke Rollins, who convinced Trump to embrace the jailbreak agenda and also dissuaded him from actually deploying the National Guard during the BLM riots of May-June 2020.

It’s very easy for Republicans to broadly inveigh against rising crime under Democrats. But unless they commit to shedding their ties to the pro-jailbreak, Koch-backed organizations pushing de-incarceration, they will continue managing a rise in crime.

Horowitz: The pandemic of de-incarceration



People are sitting in solitary confinement in the D.C. jail for a year for trespassing on public property on Jan. 6, yet in Chicago, nearly 90 murder suspects are out on bail.

Last Monday, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart revealed that in his county alone, 90 murder suspects, 40 people charged with attempted murder, and 852 people charged with aggravated gun possession are out free on bail indefinitely, waiting for their trials. What do people like this do while they are free? Commit the next crime. In 2021, 133 people were arrested for crimes committed while out on this electronic monitoring program.

Once again, it’s clear that we face a crisis not only from the war on cops, but from the war on incarceration. So many of the most heinous crimes are committed by career criminals out on pretrial bail. In New York City, a new law has abolished bail for most crimes. This has led to the creation of new programs of supervised release designed to have social workers monitor criminals and ensure they show up for trial. But what happens while they are out free?

According to The City, data compiled by the state Office of Court Administration and the state Division of Criminal Justice Services reveals that 41% of all criminals out on supervised release from Jan. 2020 through June 2021were re-arrested. Yet despite violating the terms of release, almost all of them are released again without having to post cash bail. The City found that more than half of those re-arrests occurred within four months of the defendants being freed, with 4,467 re-arrested within weeks of their release.

There is simply no deterrent left in America’s major cities. It doesn’t matter how many times they commit the crime. Darrell Johnson, 23, had more than a dozen arrests and was out pretrial for attacking a woman when he allegedly attacked two more women in broad daylight on Dec. 2. One woman was knocked unconscious and lost a tooth. Now he is out free again!

This week, the NYPD arrested Simon Martial and charged him with second-degree murder for allegedly shoving 40-year-old Michelle Alyssa Go to death from a subway platform.This happened in the heart of the Times Square subway in broad daylight. Go was killed instantly when a train hit her while she was on the tracks. Why are there so many brazen crimes like this being committed on subways? According to police, Martial had a criminal record dating back to 1998 and had an outstanding parole warrant.

Aside from the abolishing of bail, the Soros prosecutors are constantly downgrading serious violent crimes, so even if a criminal amasses a robust rap sheet, the severity of the charges is never serious enough to trigger cash bail or tougher sentencing. This is done by design. After promising to downgrade numerous felonies to misdemeanors, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg made good on that promise and reduced charges for a career criminal arrested for holding up a drug store clerk at knifepoint.

“F*** you, I’m taking everything,” William Rolon allegedly said to the female manager of a drug store on the Lower East Side as he filled up his bag without paying. Can you really blame him? He’s not wrong because he essentially can take anything without facing punishment.

Although blue states like New York are the most crime-ridden areas, red states are not immune to the growing crime wave. Harris County, Texas recorded over 600 murders in 2021, a 70% increase compared to 2019. A 2020 report from the Texan found that 57 victims have been murdered in Harris County over the past two years by defendants who had been released on multiple felony bonds and personal recognizance bonds. Texas badly needs to pass a more robust overhaul of its bail system than it did during last legislative session.

Even in states like Alabama, we have murderers getting let out on ineffective electronic monitoring. Dayvon Bray is now accused of killing his teenage girlfriend after having posted bail last August when he was arrested for murder. This November, voters in Alabama will vote on “Anita’s law,” which gives judges more discretion in denying bail for violent criminals. However, with so many liberal judges on the bench, there is a need to start mandating denial of bail in certain cases.

Then there is the coming torrent of federal prison releases. Pursuant to the jailbreak bill signed by President Trump, known as the “First Step Act,” the DOJ submitted a new policy to the Federal Register that will grant inmates 10-15 days good time credit for participating in “evidenced based” anti-recidivism programs. In other words, we will have left-wing NGOs create critical race theory types of curriculum, and that will be used to truncate federal sentences. The federal prison population is already down nearly 30% since 2013. Not surprisingly, the BOP announced that all the people released due to COVID will be able to remain free even after the pandemic.

Unless we get a handle on catch-and-release, people charged with political crimes will be the only ones left in jail.

Horowitz: The crisis of violent criminals out on bail and parole is worse than you think



In case you thought the endless catch-and-release of Darrell Brooks, the suspect in the Waukesha parade massacre who reportedly killed 6 and injured 60, was an aberration, think again. It’s a rampant problem in all 50 states, particularly in Indiana.

Last week, 20-year-old Deonta Williams was arrested on two counts of attempted murder after he allegedly stabbed two Indianapolis police officers near the Indiana State Fairgrounds on Wednesday. Williams told investigators that he lured the officers to the area by calling in a fake report of a white man harassing him. When the officers went to search for the phantom attacker, Williams admits he stabbed the officers in the neck and chest. Both officers are expected to recover, but Williams told investigators he wanted to kill one police officer because he was upset about a medical bill the city of Indianapolis sent him.

According to WTHR, Williams was arrested for burglary in January and had his bail reduced from $25,000 to $750 by a local judge. Then, he violated the terms of his release and was arrested again in July for reported criminal mischief. The obvious question is why people already given a second chance are released again when we know they are the most likely to commit violent crimes.

It turns out that the Bail Project, a pro-violent criminal organization that strives to keep violent criminals on the streets at all costs, bailed him out in March. As WISH reports, the Bail Project had previously bonded out two other violent career criminals who are now accused of murder.

The sad reality is that these are the sort of NGOs that have been driving the criminal justice policy on both sides of the aisle in all 50 states over the past decade. As Rick Snyder, the head of the Indianapolis Fraternal Order of Police, observes, these organizations need to be subjected to the same regulations as private bail bondsmen. All too often, they bail people out and the suspect never shows up for court and is able to remain free. These NGOs need to be held responsible.

It is becoming abundantly clear that we need to toughen mandatory minimums for repeat offenders, tighten — not loosen — bail laws, and create a much stronger three-strikes-and-you're-out law than we did in the 1990s. The time has come for all 50 states to pass legislation in January when the legislatures reconvene that will toughen bail laws in general and end bail for anyone who already violated their bail terms after the first crime. This would likely prevent the majority of violent crimes in this country.

Most violent criminals don't come out of nowhere. They are known wolves. One study in Sweden in 2014 found that 1% of the criminals were responsible for 63% of all violent crime convictions. Researchers found that if all violent criminals were locked up after a third conviction, "more than 50% of all convictions for violent crime in the total population would be prevented."

Just how much is the “bail reform” movement responsible for the growing crime wave? CWB Chicago, which reports assiduously on the Chicago crime scene, created a list of 53 known Chicago criminals who were arrested for murder or attempted murder this year, affecting a total of 75 victims after having been released on bail, or without even having to post any cash bail. Many of these victims were children. The latest bailed-out criminal charged with attempted murder is 19-year-old Maalik Lumpkins, who is charged with shooting a 1-year-old. Several months ago, Lumpkins was charged with felony aggravated unlawful use of a weapon. But because in Chicago they don’t take gun crimes seriously and only oppose guns for those defending themselves from these criminals, Lumpkins was released on his own recognizance.

The release of violent criminals has become the catalyst for reversing New York’s once miraculous decline in crime. Last week, a Columbia University graduate student and an Italian tourist were stabbed in unprovoked attacks in what used to be a very safe part of Manhattan. The suspect was on supervised release for viciously beating another innocent person and had been arrested 11 times since 2012. Second chances, you say?

Fox News reported last week that Jacqueline Avant, wife of Grammy Award-winning music executive Clarence Avant, was killed in her Beverly Hills home by another paroled career criminal. The suspect, Aariel Maynor, was released from prison just weeks before, after serving three years of a four-year sentence for a 2018 robbery and grand theft, which in itself was only made possible his early release from a 2013 sentence for robbery and causing great bodily injury.

Another way the pro-criminal crowd is flooding the streets with criminals is by letting them off on mental health diversion programs. Eric Ramos-Hernandez was seen on video in 2020 punching, kicking, and shoving 84-year-old Rong Xin Liao off his seated walker while waiting for a bus in Santa Clara County, California. Despite the victim suffering life-altering wounds, Ramos-Hernandez was released seven months later and actually re-arrested and released for another crime thereafter. He was released because the DA’s office claims the victim went along with a plan to place the suspect in a mental health diversion program, a claim the victim’s family vehemently denies. If someone truly is incorrigibly violent because of mental health problems, then he certainly needs to be taken off the streets – whether in a traditional prison or a mental ward.

Last week, Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm blamed the release of Darrell Brooks on a “human error,” but the only human error involved is a decadent ideology that believes in de-incarceration at all costs. This gutter ideology has permeated both parties, including allegedly conservative think tanks and even the Trump administration. It’s time to reverse this fatal error.

Horowitz: How lockdowns created more deaths from murderers



If the shutdown of schools was the evilest part of the lockdown, the shutdown of the court system is a close second.

Throughout the past year, liberals have wrongly blamed skyrocketing crime on the pandemic rather than on their criminal release policies and BLM rioting. However, there is one important way that the pandemic — or more aptly put, the response to the pandemic — will continue to contribute to more crime for years to come. Thanks to the lockdown, politicians and judges shut down our court system for months in some cities, leading to a dangerous backlog of murder cases, which can result in many of the most dangerous criminals walking free.

Thanks to the severity and duration of the Michigan shutdown, just in Genesee County, Michigan, alone, there is a backlog of 1,300 criminal cases. As a result, the office of Prosecutor David Leyton is planning to offer more plea bargains. As I've reported over the years in numerous crime cases, plea deals create a cascading effect of leniency that allows criminals to get back on the streets for longer and commit many more crimes before being locked up.

The Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor, Fani Willis, said that if she cannot complete enough cases by mid-September, up to 1,433 defendants charged with violent crimes could be released, of which 70%-90% are gang-related. Ever wonder how many murderers will potentially be released if the backlog continues?In King County, Washington, there are more than 250 pending murder cases and 400 sexual assault cases, out of a total of 3,000 violent crime cases. The president of the King County Superior Court said that felony trials were shut down for an entire nine months, a completely indefensible move not based on any science.

This problem is raging in red states too, where the court systems shut down for almost as long. Wonder why Houston is experiencing a 40% increase in homicides? KRIV-TV reports that the current criminal case backlog in Harris County stands at 140,000, with more than half involving felony offenses. Crime was already going up because so many Harris County violent criminals were let out with little or no bond, but the shutdown exacerbated it. Defendants out on multiple felony bonds are suspected responsible for 127 murders.

According to ABC13 news, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo "said she does not believe that building more prisons and using taxpayer dollars to support the mass incarceration of nonviolent offenders is going to fix the increased crime in Black and brown communities." Which means that is exactly what we need to do.

Even more important than funding the police is for the states to use their enormous amount of COVID funding to fund prosecutor offices, build prisons, and hire more judges and makeshift courtrooms to get these trials rolling. There is no use spending more COVID funding on testing, tracing, vaccines, ineffective treatments, and empowering the respective state departments of health. Prosecutors need the resources badly, but in order to ensure that the extra funding doesn't go toward "criminal justice reform" programs, the funding should be conditioned on landing the maximum convictions, not accepting plea bargains.

It's interesting that when it comes to the Jan. 6 protesters, our government has spared no resource in churning the wheels of justice against them. With states flush with more printed cash from the feds than ever before, where is the sense of urgency to protect victims of crime and lock up the backlog of violent criminals? It's amazing how our budget on welfare, health care, and education constantly increases well beyond the growth of the population, but when it comes to prisons, the politicians have decided they will cap the number regardless of the consequences.

Indeed, the spike in crime has nothing to do with the emotional toll of the virus, but the fact that our response to it aggravated the existing cause of already-increasing crime: namely, a lack of deterrent. Since the middle of last decade, most major cities — from the prosecutors to the judges — adopted a pro-criminal culture that stigmatized incarceration the same way our political system stigmatized parole and release in the 1990s. The COVID jailbreak simply turbocharged those existing policies and telegraphed the message to violent criminals that the law will never catch up with them. It's just one of many other ancillary side effects of the lockdowns we will be enduring for years to come.

Horowitz: Man accused of killing midshipman’s mom in Annapolis was out of jail on multiple gun charges



The media has shoved George Floyd and the names of other career criminals like Rayshard Brooks and Daunte Wright down our throats to the point that nearly every American knows their names. Every American saw the grieving parents who waxed poetic about the police after they raised children who turned into violent criminals. But the stories of black victims of crime like Michelle Cummings that never get told – people who raised their children to be promising leaders and upstanding citizens.

Michelle Cummings and her husband, Leonard, were in Annapolis on June 29 to see their son's induction into the Naval Academy for the coming year. The Houston couple was looking forward to attending Induction Day and joy for their son, who will play football at the Academy. That joy was cut down when Cummings was killed while sitting on the balcony of her Annapolis hotel room.

Just like the political elites want to blame our justice system for Floyd's death, Cummings' death actually represents a much more common flaw in the system – release of career violent criminals on home confinement. Last week, Annapolis police announced the arrest of Angelo Reno Harrod, an Annapolis resident who was allegedly aiming to kill gang rivals but wound up striking Cummings.

Harrod, of course, has a litany of arrests dating back to 2010, and one has to wonder if his record went even further back when he was a juvenile. He has eight prior convictions, including a robbery, pistol whipping a driver of a vehicle over $2 of a fare, and resisting arrest and fighting with officers who wanted to take an illegal firearm away from him.

And in a state where law-abiding citizens cannot carry firearms, Harrod was arrested twice in less than two months on felony gun charges, but was released. According to court documents, Harrod was charged on Feb. 10 with assault and firearm possession and then again on April 12, when he was charged on firearms and drug possession. Yet he was still released on an ankle bracelet to his mother's home!

Who's the mother? When prosecutors were describing Harrod's attempted ambush on two individuals, his mother reportedly blurted out during the bail hearing last Thursday, "Prove it." Had police successfully shot Harrod before he killed Cummings, his name would have been added to the list of BLM heroes and this mother would have been paraded on TV. She is the antithesis of Michelle Cummings, who raised her kid to join the Navy, but BLM has no regard for her.

Black Lives Matter is built upon a lie. The Marxists promoting that movement only care about black criminals, not the black victims they create through their anti-police and anti-incarceration policies. Home confinement is a joke. Police are being forced to monitor a record number of violent criminals who used to be locked up, and now they have fewer resources. Harrod was able to cut off his bracelet on May 3, yet police were still unable to locate him before the June 29 shooting.

Harrod had two prior convictions for illegal possession of firearms, including those related to robbery. He should have been in prison for life under three strikes and you're out, but records show he never served time in prison and only served short stints in jail. The Anne Arundel County state's attorney argued in April that he should have been held without bail, but the liberal judge released him.

Harrod is thus the prototype of the criminals committing all the murders today. The left will wax poetic about guns and police brutality, but nearly every murder, particularly murders of black victims, could have been prevented had we enforced the gun laws against them. Law-abiding citizens in Maryland cannot carry weapons during a period of record crime stemming from the release of people who commit crimes with guns. Maryland is a de facto open carry state, so long as you have a criminal record.

BLM and the bipartisan criminal justice deform leniency-industrial complex that promotes BLM's policy agenda are telegraphing the message to young black criminals that crime pays. They are creating more and more criminals beginning at a younger age, a trend that is destroying black communities.

According to this Vera report, theU.S. prison population dropped by over 240,000 persons, a little more than 17%, from 2019 to the spring of 2021. Already in 2019, before the precipitous decline from coronavirus jailbreak, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the imprisonment rate of black residents was the lowest rate in 30 years, since 1989. While the left is celebrating this fact and pushing for a much greater reduction, those prison population declines translate into increased spilled blood on the streets. It's time to recognize that the de-incarceration agenda was a failed experiment and change course.

Republicans would be foolish not to embrace a new agenda for tougher sentencing. This is borne out by the results of a stunning survey from Navigation Research. The poll found that the majority of Americans agree we are in a "state of crisis," but the public is very divided along partisan lines regarding which issue is a crisis. For example, the overwhelming majority of Democrats believe coronavirus and "climate change" are crises but not Republicans. The opposite is true for the issues of inflation, voter fraud, and China dominance. But there is one exception: violent crime.

The majority of both parties' voters believe it is a crisis, but most telling, 70% of black respondents – more than any other demographic – believe violent crime is a crisis currently plaguing America. In fact, among black people surveyed, crime was above every other issue except for coronavirus, with which it was virtually tied.

The question for Republicans who have gotten sucked into the Koch-Kushner vortex of de-incarceration in order to shill for the black vote is this: Do they represent families more like the Cummingses or the Harrods?

Horowitz: The parole of murderers and the silencing of victims



George Gascon, the new Soros-backed district attorney in Los Angeles, promised "the lowest level of intervention for the criminal justice system." That quite literally means letting murderers out of prison.

In 1991, Howard Elwin Jones was convicted of murdering two teenagers at a party. Jones, a known gang member, should have received the death penalty, but because he was just shy of his 18th birthday at the time of the murders, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison. After Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB 260 into law, most juvenile murderers became eligible retroactively for parole after 25 years.

In the past, eligibility for parole didn't mean automatic release, especially for convicted murderers, but now with prosecutors in major cities acting like defense attorneys, it is making it a lot harder to keep denying them parole at their biannual hearings. After being denied parole in 2015 and 2017, constantly making the victims' families relive the experience over and over again, Jones was granted parole earlier this year and will be released next week. Thus, while his victims will remain teenagers in the grave forever, Jones now gets to live a normal life and is only 50 years old.

So, what changed this time at the parole hearing? According to KTTV-TV's Bill Melugan, George Gascon has barred all prosecutors in the DA's office from attending parole hearings, much less advocating on behalf of the victims' families, even in the worst cases. Dianne Baker-Taylor, the sister of one of Jones' victims who was forced to attend the hearing alone, told KTTV that Jones didn't even express remorse. "It's isolating, you feel alone, you don't feel like you have anybody in your corner," she said.

According to Baker-Taylor, Governor Gavin Newsom never replied to her plea against the release of Jones, and the only correspondence the family ever got from the state was the letter of notification that Jones would be released.

The granting of parole then went through a 120 day review period, which included Governor Newsom’s review. Dianne… https://t.co/Z1ZcEMVqZL

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) 1622651548.0

The entire criminal justice system is designed to advocate on behalf of the criminals while shafting the victims, yet the politicians still think the criminal justice system is too punitive for criminals.

Since his election last year, Gascon announced numerous changes to the office, including that his prosecutors would no longer charge any juvenile as an adult or seek the death penalty for any murderer. He also stopped filing enhancement charges for gang members or those with multiple prior felony convictions.

The results have been devastating. According to L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who now has to deal with the fallout from Gascon's policies, every major crime category is up significantly over this time last year. In May 2021, the county experienced a 95% increase in murder, a 7% increase in rape, a 13% increase in aggravated assaults, a 40% increase in grand theft auto, and a 22% increase in arson incidents, compared to May 2020.

Most people are following the recall election against Gov. Gavin Newsom, but the recall against Gascon is likely to make a bigger impact. In the case of the gubernatorial election, it's quite unlikely that a Republican will unseat Newsom in California. But a successful recall election against Gascon in L.A. County would likely trigger the emergence of another Democrat who is more friendly to law enforcement and victims of crime, similar to the prior prosecutor Gascon unseated in a runoff election last year. Recall organizers have until October 27 to gather 580,000 signatures, a goal they are confident they will exceed.

Republicans would be stupid not to latch onto the crime issue and use it as a cudgel in suburban neighborhoods in all 50 states. While California usually leads the nation in pro-criminal trends, the movement to parole some of the worst criminals is endemic of many other states. Virginia's parole board has released dozens of murderers, as has the state of Massachusetts.

However, the political jailbreak of violent prisoners is not just in blue states. Utah has a crisis of hundreds of violent criminals being paroled, while parole officers are becoming reluctant to reincarcerate them after they violate the terms of parole. A KUTV report from Wendy Halloran discovered that Terence Trent Vos, one of the most notorious gangsters in Salt Lake City, who was serving time for drive-by shootings, aggravated assaults, robberies, and weapons violations, was granted a rare form of compassionate release in 2020 because his daughter was murdered by her own mother. Now his girlfriend is dead, allegedly murdered by Vos in May.

It took just five weeks for Vos to wind up back in prison after he was caught drunk driving. But then COVID hit, and like other red states, Utah released a bunch of criminals including Vos. When parole officers attempted to visit Vos on a routine follow-up, they could not make contact with him but did find bullet holes in Vos' home. The officers never followed up on the suspicious activity, nor did they issue a warrant for his arrest after they failed to make contact with him for months.

On Jan. 30, 2021, Vos' girlfriend pressed charges after he allegedly beat her severely in a restaurant. By that point the system had failed, and the ankle monitor they gave Vos turned out to be worthless. Police later found the body of Vos' girlfriend, Shandon Scott, in a car on Interstate 80 on May 1.

Just this week in allegedly conservative Fort Wayne, Indiana, Cohen Bennett Hancz-Barron, 21, was arrested for the gruesome murder of a woman and three children. Local media report that the suspect had a robbery conviction for which he was sentenced in February to six years in prison, but was allowed to serve all of the sentence at home! Just two months later, police filed a "notice of escape" and a warrant for his arrest, but as always it was too late. They could not locate him before the murder.

Now imagine a country with tens of thousands more people like him out on the streets, supposedly being monitored by parole officers, thanks to criminal justice deform. Do you feel safer?

The only question now is when all the "conservative" governors who joined the Soros DAs and blue-state governors in promoting de-incarceration will realize their failed social experiment is destroying the country.

Horowitz: Red-state jailbreak: Utah faces fugitive parole crisis with violent criminals released early



The one-sided leniencies for criminals and disregard for victims of crime are often associated with the politics of California and New York. Unfortunately, many red states have adopted this twisted version of criminal justice "reform," originally catalyzed by Utah. Now a new murder arrest of a violent career criminal out on parole, in conjunction with a new report about the broken parole system, sheds new light on Utah's much-vaunted effort to keep criminals out of jail and on the streets, an agenda that has been pushed nationally by Utah Sen. Mike Lee.

On Saturday, 31-year-old Terence Trent Vos is accused of crashing his car on I-80 and fleeing the scene. The dead body of his girlfriend was found by police in his car, and they believe he murdered her. As always, the first thought that comes to mind is: Could this murder have been avoided? Was this a first-time offender? As KUTV-TV reports, Trent Vos is a Bloods gang member with numerous arrests including for a drive-by shooting, prohibited possession of a firearm, drugs, obstruction of justice, and aggravated assault. As early as 2006, he was accused of firing his gun on a highway.

Not surprisingly, violent gang members don't tend to reform their behavior. Despite all these arrests, Vos doesn't appear to have served much time and was recently out on parole. Despite being wanted in 2015 for several drive-by shootings, he has cycled in and out of the system and remained free on parole. After being convicted of unlawful possession of a weapon in 2019, he was paroled in 2020. A warrant was issued for his arrest this February, but like most violent felons on parole, he became a fugitive, and the parole board appears to have lost track of him until the murder.

The case of Vos is not an aberration. Ever since Utah championed jailbreak legislation to place more people on parole, violent criminals have been getting away with more violent crimes and are not re-incarcerated for violating parole. Moreover, a new masterful investigative report by KUTV reveals a troubling pattern of the parole board losing track of violent felons and trying to cover it up.

Reporter Wendy Halloran found that Utah Adult Probation and Parole has lost track of and could not account for 328 parolees statewide each month. Thus "killers, sex offenders, violent gang members from every street gang, and some of the worst of the worst remain unknown." There has been a 72% increase in parole absconders since 2015, which is not surprising, because in 2015, Utah passed a law downgrading a bunch of crimes and shortening sentences. This placed more people on parole rather than in prison.

The public was of course promised that the leniencies were only targeting first-time, nonviolent offenders, but in reality, as I noted at the time, the prison population is not driven by low-level offenders. Thus, as has been proven in every state, these jailbreak initiatives let out violent criminals who are often caught after their release for drug or weapons charges or parole violations, which are now viewed as low-level, without factoring in the criminal's past history.

KUTV reports that whistleblowers within the department reached out to KUTV, but officials from the department canceled interviews on three separate occasions. KUTV reports that there seems to be a systemic problem within the parole board leading the board to always favor keeping criminals out of prison:

Frustrated parole agents have risked their jobs to tell 2News what's really going on inside AP&P. Former agents claim they lost their police powers and were turned into social workers by supervisors who, more often than not, required them to give the parolee another chance instead of writing a warrant and sending it to the Board of Pardons and Parole in an effort to send them back to prison.

A video presentation used to train AP&P agents corroborates what the whistleblowers say. During a 2019 training seminar, presenter Dennis Franklin seems to imply exactly what the agents we spoke to complained about — AP&P wants agents to be more like social workers, as opposed to law enforcement.

I have been a lonely voice warning against the bipartisan jailbreak cartel. This was never about finding the few instances where the justice system is too strict and reforming them amid the exponentially greater numbers of cases where criminals were already given too much leeway. This was about cutting the prison population at all costs. Given that you can't cut the prison population with only low-level criminals, they had to let out high-level criminals. Given that most of them violate second and third chances, this was never about offering criminals second chances. It's about ensuring that violent parole violators remain out of jail.

Both violent crime and property crime have been surging in Salt Lake City. Last year, a career criminal was released from a halfway house under a new "low-level" leniency program and threatened a woman at knifepoint in her own bed just days later. In 2016, one year after passage of the much-vaunted Justice Reinvestment Act, a career criminal who was eligible for early parole under this program murdered a Salt Lake City cop. He had accrued a decade-long rap sheet of charges for drugs, firearms violations, and theft — the paradigm of a career criminal eligible for early release under the proposed federal legislation.

Now, just consider the fact that police have lost control of hundreds of criminals with similar profiles who used to be behind bars. Yet Utah RINOs have not learned their lesson. They continue to push for more jailbreak bills and even passed a New York-style bill in 2020 abolishing bail for many criminals, which turned out to be such a disaster that it had to be repealed this year.

The criminals have gotten a decade of their "reforms." Now it's time for victims of crime to get their decade of reforms so that Salt Lake City doesn't become like Portland.

Horowitz: Anarchy! California to release another 76,000 criminals as crime surges and police quit



It's still a mystery to the media why crime is skyrocketing in much of the country, but any sane person knows that when you let criminals back onto the streets, you get more criminal behavior. When you treat the police like criminals, you get less policing. The result is utter anarchy.

Evidently, in California, the only crimes one can commit are not wearing a mask or opening a business against coronavirus edicts. Murder, robbery, or assault? Not so much. The AP is reporting that "with little notice," California decided to increase good behavior credits for 76,000 inmates, "including violent and repeat felons," which will enable them to trim their already diminishing sentences by as much as one third. So much for the promise of only offering more chances to "first-time, nonviolent" offenders. More than 20,000 people serving life without parole – something very hard to achieve in California these days – will be eligible for early release.

The changes were approved as an emergency regulation with almost no public notice. There is an emergency for them to get as many violent criminals as possible out on the streets before the public can protest. The prison population has already dropped by nearly 20% because of coronavirus jailbreak and will wind up being roughly half its level earlier last decade. Just last month, the state announced the closure of a second prison this year because the prison population is dwindling.

Now, is the prison population declining because crime is becoming scarcer? Not a chance. According to Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore, shootings have increased by 73% over the same period in 2020. Motor vehicle thefts are up 20%. Nearly half the shootings, according to Moore, are by gang members, yet District Attorney George Gascón is prohibiting his prosecutors from pushing sentencing enhancements for nearly 20,000 convicted criminals, including gang members.

Not only are there exponentially more criminals on the streets, but the thin blue line that stands between them and the citizenry is getting thinner. A recent survey showed that 40% of LAPD officers are considering quitting.

This comes as police around the country face a surge in retirements. The Philadelphia police department experienced a sevenfold increase in the number of officers being accepted into the city's Deferred Retirement Option Program during the first four months of this year relative to the same time period last year. The NYPD, the largest metro police force in the country, saw a 75% increase in retirements in 2020. 2,600 officers quit and 2,746 filed for retirement, accounting for roughly 15% of the entire NYPD.

The message being telegraphed to law enforcement is that they are the robbers and Black Lives Matter are the cops. What have George Floyd and BLM wrought upon America's major cities? Minneapolis experienced the second highest number of murders on record. Just last week, there were 107 violent crimes reported across Minneapolis, which is nearly double the number during the same week in 2020, before the BLM riots began at the end of May. Carjackings were up 331% last year.

Police now understand that even if they are able to successfully arrest violent criminals and rioters without getting themselves killed or getting prosecuted, the justice system will just let them go. CBS is reporting that District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine is personally informing more than 200 rioters who perpetrated last summer's violent uprisings that they will not be prosecuted and he is requesting a judge to seal their arrest records. In Portland, 92% of those arrested during the interminable rioting have not been prosecuted, and it's unlikely that the remaining suspects will receive more than a slap on the wrist.

The twisted irony is that the woke white liberals whose families are not yet affected by the crime bubble think they are doing black neighborhoods a favor by releasing black criminals, but in fact almost every victim of those crimes will be black. The Daily Mail reports that during the week after the Floyd incident, 80% of the victims in the record number of shootings in Minneapolis were black. As one Minneapolis police officer so depressingly summed it up: "One of us is gonna get killed and nobody cares. And that's what's sad. Nobody cares. Not the citizens, not our brass. Not our administration, not our city. They don't care. They don't care one bit."

The results?

"We're getting fed up. All of us. And there's only a few of us left that really want to work for the city. We're not gonna be here. We're gonna all leave. So this is gonna get worse before it gets better."

Horowitz: Woke justice: Ohio criminal released on parole allegedly shoots man to death, released on bail again



Maybe it's something in the air or food or the virus causing the record spike in crime. The source of the crime wave is a real head-scratcher to the political class. But to those of us who live in the real world, the culprit for the sudden reversal in crime trends is obvious. We no longer lock up even the most violent criminals, particularly juvenile offenders. The case of Javontae Williams, 17, in Columbus, Ohio, is as predictable as it is tragic and exemplifies why there are so many violent criminals on the streets today relative to the last decade.

In October 2020, Javontae Williams, 17, was arrested in Columbus, Ohio for the murder of 21-year-old Sage Martin in a mall parking lot on September 20. He is accused of standing over the victim and shooting him point-blank while he lay on the ground. Yet as of last week, he is free as a bird as he awaits trial.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, Williams had a lengthy rap sheet and was already under house arrest and electronic monitoring for other crimes. But two and a half months before he allegedly committed the murder, Williams was taken off electronic monitoring in what is known as the "honor system house arrest." Now, despite that he is accused of breaking that honor system in the most profound way, Judge Kim Browne allowed Williams to be released on bail, which he posted last Monday.

The mother of Sage Martin put out the following statement:

Just as the rest of the community, I am truly flabbergasted that first Juvenile Justice Kim Browne gave such a low bond and although I understand Judge Chris Brown did not want to overturn his colleague[']s ruling, I find it reckless considering how the court is very much aware that in 2020 alone, that Javontae has been caught with firearms. As his charges escalated, his punishments lessened. From being in a Juvenile Detention Center to Ankle monitoring, it's very disheartening that Judicial System did the very minimum to stop him from wreaking havoc on our community. I thank everyone for their continued prayers as we await justice as a community.

Prosecutors are now concerned that witnesses, of which there are many, will be scared to testify. This is a growing problem with violent criminals increasingly being released multiple times before trial. Not only is there a risk that they will commit more crimes, but it makes it hard to land a conviction even for the original crime because witnesses are dissuaded from testifying. This is done by design to keep criminals out of prison and on the streets.

Judge Browne was the chief author of a statement issued by the Franklin County Juvenile Court judges in February calling a recent effort by police to target juvenile crime as "unnecessary detention of predominately African-American youths" and called the police press conference "propaganda."

Our country is facing a plague of youth crime, particularly carjackings, but the woke judges are playing the race card against the citizenry of this country. According to the FBI Uniform Crime report, in 2018, black youth were responsible for 58% of juvenile murders, 64% of robbery, 41% of aggravated assault, 52% of motor vehicle theft, and 48% of overall violent crime among offenders under 18. If it is now the policy of our judicial system that black juveniles cannot be punished for violent crime, our country is in grave trouble, and the first to pay for it will be black victims of crime, such as Sage Martin.

Ohio in particular has been hit by rising crime among teens and adults. All of the state's major cities experienced record homicides in 2020. With 147 homicides last year, Columbus surpassed the original record set in 1991. Central Ohio is plagued by a rash of juvenile car thefts committed by children who seem to be younger and younger.

As long ago as 1981, Reagan's Task Force on Victims of Crime observed, "A substantial proportion of the violent crime in this country is committed by juveniles, who are becoming more violent at an increasingly early age." The report also noted that "juveniles too often are not held accountable for their conduct, and the system perpetuates this lack of accountability." Both of those factors are demonstrably more poignant today than 40 years ago and are, to a large degree, fueling the sharpest increase in crime in a generation.

At present, we have an epidemic of crime that has been exacerbated by the race-baiters who believe, as Orwell said in "Animal Farm," that "some animals are more equal than others." Also, COVID, which has been used as an excuse to upend every aspect of civilization, has further exacerbated the trend of people being released to commit more crimes. A woman in Riverside, California, was stabbed to death over the weekend allegedly by a woman who had been released just four days before after assaulting another woman with a deadly weapon. According to CNN, "she was released shortly thereafter on a 'notice to appear' citation due to the current emergency bail schedule in place in Riverside during the Covid-19 pandemic."

Thus, almost every violent criminal is now released to commit more crimes without any deterrent. Meanwhile, the only people in this country who have been held without bail are those Capitol Hill protesters against whom there was "no evidence" showing they "vandalized any property or physically harmed any person."

In a world turned upside down, violent criminals are treated like nonviolent delinquents, while nonviolent people are treated like mass murderers. But of course, it all depends on the color of skin of the offender. Lady Justice is no longer blind. The woke judges have given her 20/20 vision to discriminate with perfect precision.