Horowitz: Chicago releases the most violent offenders to commit the exact same crimes



What happens when you let career violent criminals out on little or no bail with no fear of punishment for violating their terms of release? In a dystopian hell like Chicago, that means an individual released after being charged with punching a woman in the face and kicking a cop in the groin will be rearrested for … punching a woman in the face and kicking a cop in the groin. Oh, and another sex offender released on charges of molesting multiple women will be rearrested for … molesting another woman!

At a time when the FBI and DHS are spying on political opponents with no criminal records as if they are violent criminals, known violent criminals are released to repeat the worst crimes again. Let’s meet James Killingsworth, a career criminal who was arrested right before Christmas 2020 for stealing a woman’s phone on a Chicago street and then kicking the arresting cop in the groin. The prosecution later linked him to a robbery a few days earlier in which he punched a woman in the face in broad daylight and stole her phone. One would think that aggravated battery of a peace officer, theft, attempted robbery, and aggravated battery in a public place would put him away for a while, but when he reported to prison on October 19, 2022, he was released on the same day because of good time credits and time served.

Fast-forward just six days later, and Killingsworth was arrested on October 25 for punching a woman at a transit station and then kicking the arresting officer in the groin, according to CWB Chicago. De ja vu! This case would be one for the books even if the system finally locked him up, but it gets worse. The Illinois Department of Corrections refused to charge him with a parole violation, and the judge released him on just $12,000 bail!

Contrast this with military veterans with no criminal records who are still serving two years pretrial without any chance for bail for charges that don’t even allege touching a police officer or punching someone in the face.

What about sexual assault? Surely the system would give those perps the “January 6 treatment,” right? Wrong! Meet David Buckner, the terror of Chicago transit, courtesy of CWB Chicago reporting:

In June, a prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office refused to file felony charges against Buckner after two women accused him of licking, kissing, squeezing, and groping them on the Magnificent Mile. With felony charges denied, Chicago police had to charge Buckner with misdemeanor battery. He was released from jail a few days later to await trial.

On October 9, while he was still on bail for the June allegations, two more women accused Buckner of touching them inappropriately at the Roosevelt CTA station. He walked out of the local Chicago police station a few hours later on his own recognizance, charged only with misdemeanor battery again. Records that would show if prosecutors rejected felony charges for the new allegations have not been posted in public records.

Then, just before 2 p.m. Wednesday, while still on bail for the June and October cases, he allegedly assaulted an 18-year-old woman on the Loyola campus, not far from the Red Line station.

He grabbed the woman’s body and her left butt cheek, prosecutor Jeff Allen said. Once again, Buckner is only charged with a misdemeanor.

Despite the multiple bail violations and arrests for serious crimes, Judge Kelly McCarthy ordered Buckner to pay just a $5,000 deposit toward bail in the Loyola case and $3,000 in the June case until Buckner sees the judge overseeing that matter on Monday. It turns out that in 2017, he was accused by a list of women for grotesque sexual offenses in the subways. The Chicago Tribune reported at the time that prosecutors said Buckner admitted to “probably” molesting 75 women. Yet a week before Thanksgiving of last year, when he was charged for violating the terms of the sex offender registry, he was released on his own recognizance because of an insanity plea.

This is the two-tiered justice we have in America. This is why the streets are full of violent criminals who will commit endless violent crimes for years to come. Think about all the violent criminal who used to be locked up during the “tough on crime” era who are now out. Those people need to be behind bars.

This chart from the New York Times shows the dangers on the streets in one chart:

The Left is celebrating the fact that the black incarceration rate has been nearly cut in half over the past generation and are calling for even more prison releases. However, when you measure the body count of thousands of excess black homicide victims over the past few years, you realize that this is nothing to celebrate. The reality is that among the black population, unfortunately, are a disproportionate share of violent criminals, usually tied to gangs. They are not in prison at higher numbers because of low-level crimes or drug crimes, but for violent crimes. According to the FBI’s crime data explorer, roughly 60% of the homicide offenders in 2021 whose race was known were black.

Any effort to go soft on prison sentences of career criminals out of concern for black prison rates – a sentiment too many Republicans have bought into over the past decade – will necessarily result in harming black victims of crime more than anyone else. Almost 60% of the homicide victims in 2021 were also black.

It’s no longer enough for Republicans to run ads complaining about crime and promising to “fund the police.” They need to promise mandatory minimums for violent and repeat offenders, toughening penalties for bail, parole, and probation violations, targeting gangs, and a legitimate three-strikes-and-you’re-out law.

While one can debate the degree of punishment to mete out to lower-level criminals, the street crimes we are witnessing in America’s major cities are being committed by those whom both parties used to deem a threat and support taking off the streets. Yet now we live in a world where Democrat Governors like Kathy Hochul in New York don’t understand why it’s so important to lock these people up. Hopefully, Republicans have finally learned their lesson and will pursue criminal justice reform in the exact opposite way they did this past decade and save their desire for grace and leniency for those targeted for political crimes.

Horowitz: FL man released early after heinous child murder charged with grisly murder of Broward woman



"And you shall not corrupt the land in which you live, for the blood corrupts the land, and the blood which is shed in the land cannot be atoned for except through the blood of the one who shed it." —Numbers 35:33

There's a reason why biblical values dictate an "eye for an eye" in murder cases. It's not just punishment, but deterrent as well. For if you release a murderer, you now have blood on your hands for allowing someone with such a uniquely demonic proclivity to murder again. This is now happening all over the country, with "elderly" murderers being released and going on to murder again. The latest case from Florida demonstrates just how weak our criminal justice system is, even in red states.

In 1995, Eric Pierson was convicted of strangling 17-year-old Kristina Whitaker to death just one year after being released from prison for a prior attempted murder charge. At the time, he only served four and a half years for the attempted murder. Fast-forward 25 years, and Pierson was released again and is now, once again, being charged with murder within a year of release. Police say Pierson confessed to stabbing Erika Verdecia, 33, a single mother, four times with a screwdriver on Sept. 25. He confessed to the murder last month, but he was only charged with first-degree murder last Saturday when Verdecia's body was found in a canal near Sunrise, Broward County.

The obvious question is: How does a man convicted of strangling a girl to death after already having served time for attempted murder get released? Well, he was sentenced to 40 years in 1995, but was released September 2020, after serving just 25 years. This is happening everywhere in the country. The craziest thing is that the first victim could have been saved had Pierson served more time. In 1985, Pierson had broken into a home and slit a woman's throat, but was paroled just four and a half years into his 18-year sentence.

It is true that Florida has since updated its truth-in-sentencing laws and currently requires 85% of the sentence to be served; however, this story underscores the problem with good behavior credits across the board. Let's face it, there aren't too many opportunities for an incarcerated man to have "bad behavior." Good time credits have become a joke – a standard formality that is accorded to every single criminal, no matter how heinous and violent his crime was or his risk of reoffending. There is no reason why any part of the sentence should be diminished for murderers. The entire concept of good time credits needs to be reformed and needs to be applied only for lower-level crimes. This is especially true with sentences getting shorter and shorter up front.

Just like with COVID fascism, Republicans in red states have internalized all of the false arguments of the left regarding criminal justice. They claim there are too many people in the prisons and that they need to release even more criminals. But if that is truly the case, then the answer is to build more prisons and actually get tougher on criminals to deter even more of them. Their argument is akin to someone waiting too long to make a left turn onto a busy street and declaring, "I've waited long enough, I'm just going to make the turn anyway."

A recent study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (table 14) found that among those murderers released from state prison in 2008 and rearrested within 10 years (a majority of them), they served a median of 10 years and 9 months in prison. In other words, aside from not properly deterring other violent criminals, we are not even locking up murderers for that long, and we are clearly paying the consequences. The answer is to execute those convicted of murder to make room in the prisons for other criminals. It is not to release them.

Yet paroling murderers is the new coolness across the country. As Virginia attorney Hans Bader warns, Virginia state Sen. Joe Morrissey (D) has introduced a bill for next year's legislative session that will retroactively reinstate parole for murderers and make them potentially eligible for release after just 15 years. Virginia has already passed numerous pro-criminal bills, including offering generous parole for juvenile murderers. Even Florida Republicans recently passed a bill calling for sweeping expungement of juvenile criminal records, a bill that Gov. DeSantis felt compelled to veto.

This entire movement began with the de facto shredding of the death penalty. "Well, life without parole is just as good." Then they claimed we needed to release "nonviolent offenders." But then when they discovered the obvious — that most of the prisons are full of high-level, repeat violent offenders — they began releasing murderers too. Eventually, a life sentence will just mean a few years behind bars, and those are just among the few who actually get sentenced to life. Which is why the death penalty was always the best way to deal with murder. There is no parole from the grave, just like there are no second chances for the victims of murder.

Horowitz: Man accused of shoving woman onto NYC subway tracks released 4 days earlier after similar attack



If the panacea for the virus is early treatment before it shuts down your lungs, the cure to the crime epidemic is incarcerating the bad guys before they strike again. However, it's hard to tell which policy our government is failing worse on at this point.

Once the pride of America's largest city, New York's subways are now one of the most dangerous places to be on earth. Whereas most violent crime occurs between rival gangs in bad neighborhoods, NYC subways have been the site of a rash of random attacks in recent months. And the attacks are becoming more dangerous.

On Sunday, a 59-year-old deaf woman was punched and shoved onto the tracks in broad daylight at a Manhattan subway. Not surprisingly, when the NYPD caught the suspect a day later, he had a massive rap sheet and spent little time behind bars. The suspect, Vladimir Pierre, is a 41-year-old alleged gang member with 27 prior arrests! Here's the thing: He was arrested just four days earlier for reportedly punching a mother of two in the face, again in broad daylight, while she was waiting for a shuttle at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

How was he free to attack another woman, you might be wondering? Well, thanks to the new "criminal justice reform" signed by the now former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, assault is too low-level a crime to warrant pretrial holding. Pierre walked free without posting any bail, despite the fact that he already had two charges pending in court. One of them stemmed from yet another subway attack, in which he is accused of randomly choking, punching, and biting a woman on a train, according to the New York Post.

Criminals like Pierre used to be behind bars but are now commonplace on New York's subways and pose a particular threat to women. However, nobody is allowed to carry a gun in New York City — unless of course you are a criminal caught in felony possession, in which case you will be set free without bail.

Just two weeks ago, another woman was shoved onto a subway track in Brooklyn by a career criminal. A similar incident occurred in Queens in June when a woman suffered a deep cut on her leg from the fall. Luckily, nobody has been hit by an oncoming train in any of these incidents ... yet.

However, the jailbreak policies are taking a much more tragic toll across New York and the country in other cases. Another career criminal was let out of prison after just one year of time served for an attempted robbery and was arrested earlier this week for raping a 70-year-old Bronx woman at gunpoint in her apartment building.

The point is that nearly every violent crime in this country is committed by a repeat violent offender who has not been properly deterred and punished. Just this week, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released an updated 10-year report on recidivism in 24 states. The findings are horrific:

Among persons released from state prisons in 2008 across 24 states, 82% were arrested at least once during the 10 years following release. The annual arrest percentage declined over time, with 43% of prisoners arrested at least once in Year 1 of their release, [another] 29% arrested [by] Year 5, and 22% arrested [by] Year 10.

In other words, a little more than four in 10 incarcerated criminals are re-arrested within one year and 66% are re-arrested within three years. The numbers were even higher among criminals under age 24. What's particularly problematic is the fact that criminals are now released earlier than ever before, while an increasing share of them are paroled from day one.

This is especially true for gun and drug charges, which our system views as "low-level." The problem is that all of the violent gang members who are caught for drugs and guns go on to commit other violent crimes. The BJS report found that 75% percent of drug offenders released from prison in 2008 were arrested for a non-drug crime within 10 years. Those released after serving time for weapons charges recidivated at a higher level than any other group.

Cops in Chicago recently stumbled across a case that perfectly exemplifies the culture of leniency propelling this current wave of recidivist crime. CWB Chicago reports that last week Chicago cops stopped a car for a traffic violation and then inspected it after seeing marijuana in the car. They found three loaded guns in the center console, all illegally possessed. Here is the criminal history and this is what happened.

Prosecutors said the men are Marcus Taylor, 30, who was on bail for another pending felony gun case; Jerry Glover, 22, who has two prior felony narcotics convictions; and Isaiah Robinson, 23, who is on parole for a felony gun conviction.
But prosecutors only charged the men with one count of misdemeanor unlawful use of a weapon each. During a misdemeanor bond court hearing, Judge Susana Ortiz asked an assistant state's attorney if more serious charges were being considered. The prosecutor said no.
That, folks, is the story of Chicago and New York in a nutshell. And that will be the story of the rest of America unless Republicans begin rolling back the "criminal justice reforms" they bought into in recent years.