Blaze News original: 7 times violent crooks were released — sometimes with no bail — and soon were charged with more violence



Stories have flooded the news cycle in recent years about authorities releasing violent criminals from custody — sometimes with no bail and despite violent charges already on their records — after which they're soon charged with committing violent crimes again.

It's an issue that has many observers angry, frustrated, and fed up with woke politicians, district attorneys, judges, and social justice warriors who seem intent on keeping dangerous individuals out of jail and on streets and committing more violent crimes.

Just this month, a 30-year-old male allegedly punched a 9-year-old girl in the face while she was with her mother in the dining concourse of New York City's Grand Central Station.

WNBC-TV said the suspect got away before the Bronx girl was taken to the hospital, the station said.

Turns out just days before, cops charged the same suspect — later identified as Jean Carlos Zarzuela — reportedly for randomly punching a 54-year-old woman and breaking her nose inside Grand Central. But a source told WNBC-TV that while a judge set Zarzuela's bail at $2,500 cash — and Zarzuela went to jail — he went before a different judge soon after and was released.

Police arrested Zarzuela a few hours after the girl was punched, WNBC said. He was charged with assault, WPIX-TV said, adding that the MTA indicated additional charges are pending.

The girl suffered from dizziness and pain, WPIX reported, citing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She's expected to recover, WPIX added.

Man arrested for punching girl in Grand Central: MTAyoutu.be

“It doesn’t make any sense that this guy — who recently was released after being charged with randomly punching someone else and breaking that victim’s nose — should be back in a public space where he can attack others, especially children,” MTA Communications Director Tim Minton told WPIX. “The people responsible for the criminal justice system need to learn from this episode before more innocent people become victims.”

The following are similar recent examples:

Ex-con released with no bail after his arrest for domestic violence against estranged wife; the next day he allegedly shoots her to death in front of her children 


Adam Bennefield, 45, was charged with low-level misdemeanors in 2022 in connection with his alleged domestic violence against 30-year-old Keaira Bennefield — and the judge couldn't set bail, so he was released. Keaira Bennefield was so afraid of what might happen to her that she wore a bulletproof vest to drop her children off at school. A day later Adam Bennefield allegedly shot her to death in her car in front of her kids, ages 6 months to 9 years. The victim's mother said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul's support of cashless bail led to her daughter's murder: "She should be charged for the crime. She's also responsible for the crime. She failed me. She let me down and my daughter down, and she needs to make a change with the bail reform."

Woman released on zero bail after allegedly ramming car into businesses; a week later she's charged with arson and attempted murder


Jacqueline Whatley, 36, was arrested last October after allegedly ramming a car into a Coffee Bean and a sushi restaurant in Los Feliz, California, KTTV-TV said. Police charged her with vandalism, which was eligible for no-cash bail, and she was released, the station said. About a week later, she faced attempted murder charges in connection with setting fires that destroyed a business, a home, and an occupied tent — and this time she was being held on $1 million bail, KTTV said.

Woman beats man with pole, released with no bail while deemed 'moderate risk'; days later she kills mother of 8 


Vanessa Harvey, 49, pleaded guilty in 2023 to voluntary manslaughter in the 2021 death of 42-year-old Machina Goodjoint, KLAS-TV reported, adding that two weeks before that crime Harvey beat her first victim — a man — with a metal pole. After the first attack, Harvey refused to appear for her probable cause hearing on a charge of battery resulting in substantial bodily harm, the station said. In the attack against Goodjoint, the victim's injuries were so severe that an officer reportedly believed Goodjoint was shot in the face. Harvey was sentenced to four to 10 years in prison and will be eligible for parole next year.

Thug reportedly released without bail after allegedly punching woman in face on NYC street — and despite suspect's 7 prior assault arrests


“He just punched me on the right side here, very strong,” Dulce Pichardo told WPIX-TV of the late March unprovoked attack in Brooklyn. “I was surprised. I said, ‘What’s going on? Why did you hit me? Why did you do it?’ I didn’t do anything. No reason to hit me." Officers arrested 33-year-old Franz Jeudy, WABC-TV reported. Jeudy was charged with third-degree assault — a misdemeanor, which means he wasn't bail-eligible — and he was released, the New York Post reported. The paper added that one of Jeudy's prior arrests took place in 2018 when he was charged with second-degree assault for an attack on a cop.

Thug arrested multiple times for assaults reportedly released from custody — then just 2 days later accused of brutal hatchet attack against elderly man


The suspect in a brutal hatchet attack against an elderly man last December reportedly was released from custody two days before the attack — and also had 19 bench warrants since 2012 and had been arrested for assaulting firefighters, health care workers, police officers, and strangers. Paleti Anikesi Veniale, 30, was charged with first-degree attempted murder, and prosecutors cited his extensive history of criminal violence when they asked for bail of $1 million.

Punk released with no bail after being charged with randomly attacking 2 men; a month later he's accused of punching 19-year-old female in face, breaking her nose


— (@)

CWB Chicago reported that after prosecutors charged Diashun Dixson with randomly attacking two men — one of them 64 years old — at the Chicago French Market in May 2023, a judge ordered Dixson to pay a $10,000 bail deposit. But the outlet said he couldn't post bail and stayed in jail until December when his attorney — citing the state's elimination of cash bail — filed a motion and got Dixson released. CWB Chicago said not even a month later Dixson was accused of randomly punching a 19-year-old female college student so hard in the face that her nose was fractured. The outlet said Dixson was soon back in jail.

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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.

Despite Media Blackout, Wisconsin GOP Lawmakers Are Still Working To Prevent Another Waukesha Christmas Massacre

As the people of Waukesha wonder, 'How could this happen?' a handful of state lawmakers are asking, 'How can we prevent this from happening again?'

Horowitz: Violent criminal released by New Hampshire judge accused of brutally raping woman in cemetery six days later



These are the victim stories that are never told by politicians. These are the criminals who need to be locked up but are increasingly let out on the streets because criminal justice reform is all about the criminal, not the victim.

Amuri Diole represents everything that is wrong with our justice system. He was arrested on April 29 for allegedly assaulting a woman in a Manchester, New Hampshire, cemetery for two hours, smashing her head on a grave marker, raping her, putting a knife to her neck, and threatening to kill her. Like almost every one of these heinous criminal acts, this one was allegedly committed by a man who was incorrigibly violent and should never have been on the streets but was indeed released just six days before.

According to the Manchester Union Leader, Diole was arrested in November 2018 for reportedly brutally beating a man in Merrimack who was nice enough to employ him, despite his troubled background. During the attack, Diole allegedly broke the nose, jaw, and eye sockets of his victim. Despite five years of cycling in and out of psychiatric hospitals and being diagnosed with homicidal tendencies, Diole was not kept off the streets even after this demonic assault. He was in and out of jail since 2018, racking up more criminal arrests. Over a year later, the victim of the assault still had not gotten justice, and in January, Superior Court Judge Charles Temple ruled that Diole was incompetent to stand trial.

Freeze frame at this point. One would think that the alternative to going to prison would be locking this man up in a psychiatric institute. After all, if someone is so violent that he can't control himself, he is even more dangerous on the streets than the non-mentally ill criminals. Yet our system now uses the criminal's mental status as an excuse to simply release him. This is happening throughout the country. In this case, Diole was released from jail on April 23. The judge cited state law that gives prosecutors 90 days to obtain an order for involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital, something that is becoming very hard given that most psychiatrists are leftists and are unwilling to commit criminals.

Well, this unnamed female victim wasn't given 90 days to prepare to be raped. Nor was the victim of the previous crime for which Diore never stood trial informed of his release. The victim in the Merrimack assault told the Union Leader that he was not surprised Diole never left the cemetery after last week's alleged rape. "He's not afraid of consequences. He's not remorseful. Everyone who knows Amuri knows he's dangerous," he said.

And that is the hallmark of our criminal justice system.

According to court documents, Diole moved to the United States from Congo about 17 years ago at age 10 and lived a troubled life beginning in his teen years. It's unclear whether his family came over as refugees, but most immigrants from Congo over the past two decades have been resettled under the refugee program, many of them in New England.

The question everyone should be asking is why Republicans are not running on plugging all the loopholes that allow repeat criminals to escape justice and needlessly victimize others? The original term "criminal justice reform" was coined by Ronald Reagan to promote an agenda on behalf of victims of crime to ensure the bad guys are taken off the streets. He described it as an effort to "protect the innocent and put the professional criminals in jail where they belong." One of Reagan's particular priorities was ensuring that the criminally insane are not let back on the streets. How many Republicans ever discuss our under-incarceration problem?

The reality is that it's not only drug dealers — themselves most often violent and committing other crimes — who are escaping justice in this pro-criminal environment. Violent criminals are rarely punished commensurately with their crimes. At a time when the government claims to have zero tolerance for insurrection, federal prosecutors from Oregon dropped charges or are expected to drop charges on all but seven of the 97 Portland rioters arrested on federal charges. Remember, these are some of the worst offenders out of the thousands of rioters, riots that included attacks on a federal courthouse and involved the blinding of DHS agents with lasers. Only one individual is headed to prison for any amount of time. All charges of assault against federal agents for the remaining individuals, including one suspect accused of placing an agent in a chokehold, were dropped.

But this favoritism is not only for people beating and burning under the sacred banner of Black Lives Matter; it's for general criminals as well. Crime victim advocates in Minnesota recently pointed to a case of a man convicted a little more than a year ago for stomping someone to the point of great bodily harm, yet his 117-month sentence was stayed:

Just gonna set this here for future reference.Derek Lamont Leake, Jr, 20.IN CUSTODY on PC weapons.Convicted in… https://t.co/QmGmoMdBGx

— CrimeWatchMpls (@CrimeWatchMpls) 1620089575.0

Again, these cases are not the exception, but the rule. We now learn that Demond Goudy, the suspect in the murder of 7-year-old Jaslyn Adams at a Chicago McDonald's drive-through last month, was out on bond for four separate felony cases.

One GOP governor after another sheds crocodile tears over giving criminals a "second chance," but so many of them have dozens of chances and still serve little or no time. As my TheBlaze colleague, Sarah Taylor, recently reported, the suspect charged in the brutal stomping murder of Maryland police officer Keith Heacock in Delmar, Delaware, accrued 38 prior arrests in just a decade but doesn't appear to have served much time in prison. To this day, Biden has failed to mention a word about Officer Heacock and this terrible travesty that occurred in his home state.

Then there are criminal aliens. We like importing other countries' criminals and won't even throw the book at them. Despite having two prior arrests, Jesus Leal-Corona was never deported. In 2019, he killed 24-year-old Frankie Hensley while driving drunk in New Jersey. Breitbart reports that he was sentenced to just five years in prison. By the time the system is done with him, it would be surprising if he doesn't get out much earlier and remain in the country indefinitely.

I began focusing on public affairs as a kid during the peak of the last crime wave in the early 1990s. I watched the citizens rise up and demand action, a call that was largely heeded by both parties, including the current president. Now, we can hardly find a self-described conservative willing to hold the line on violent crime. That's a testament to the success of the left in moving the Overton window so far from the values of our grandparents.

Staggering DOJ study: 83 percent of prisoners re-arrested within 9 years of release

“The liberal approach of coddling criminals didn't work and never will. Nothing in our Constitution gives dangerous criminals a right to prey on innocent, law-abiding people.” ~Ronald Reagan, Feb. 18, 1984

The cool kids in Washington promoting the Michael Dukakis crime agenda have a clever way of enticing conservatives to support the Soros anarchist agenda. “Well, conservatives, don’t you want to save money and actually enhance public safety with less recidivism?”

How dumb of us not to know that all along, the far Left was really right about crime and that somehow the miraculous drop in crime in the ’90s following tougher sentencing laws was just a figment of our imagination.

Common sense and learned human experiences never fail to deliver the truth. Last Wednesday, the DOJ released an updated study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) showing that 83 percent of prisoners released by states under jailbreak programs similar to what the bipartisan cabal is promoting in Washington were re-arrested within nine years of their release. So much for the recidivism argument for early release programs. Unfortunately, the House was in such a rush to pass this bill even without a CBO score that the DOJ report didn’t come out until a day later.

The same people commit the crimes

The BJS study is the most comprehensive analysis of those released from prison in 30 states over the longest period of time relative to any other study. Those 30 states accounted for 77 percent of all persons released from state prisons nationwide. The total sample size was 67,966 prisoners, much greater than any study trotted out that supposedly vouches for early release programs. I cited this report in 2015 when it observed recidivism patterns over five years. Now the BJS has collected the data for the extended nine-year analysis. Here are the results:

Overall, 68 percent of released state prisoners were arrested within three years, 79 percent within six years and 83 percent within nine years. The 401,288 released state prisoners were arrested an estimated 2 million times during the nine years after their release, an average of five arrests per released prisoner.

On an annual basis, 44 percent of prisoners were arrested during the first year after release, 34 percent were arrested during the third year and 24 percent were arrested during the ninth year. Five percent of prisoners were arrested during the first year after release and were not arrested again during the 9-year follow-up period.

These numbers are staggering. They lend credence to the experience we’ve learned from locking up the bad guys over the past few decades – that most of the crime is committed by a relatively small group of people who continuously re-offend.

But here’s the kicker.

More than three-quarters (77 percent) of released drug offenders were arrested for a non-drug crime within nine years, and more than a third (34 percent) were arrested for a violent crime.

Part of why the “tough-on-crime regime” – from the Reagan era through the last decade – had so much success in lowering crime rates is because most of the criminals were involved in drugs and property crimes. Whether you are a hawk or a dove on drugs is immaterial to the fact that most of those trafficking drugs are involved in many other crimes and account for most of the crimes committed. Thus, getting them off the streets worked wonders. It didn’t stop the spread of drugs (although I would argue that is because we never went after the source via our foreign policy and immigration policy), but it absolutely did stop a lot of the violent crime and property crimes. When you let out drug offenders early from prison in this era, they will not only go back to selling even deadlier drugs, killing thousands, they will also commit other crimes.

This is just the beginning of jailbreak

The House-passed “First Step Act,” which is the first step to the broader agenda of its proponents to dismantle the Reagan crime agenda, does not make any exceptions for heroin and fentanyl traffickers for early release programs. And yes, they absolutely are early release programs. Ironically, proponents of the bill, who also support getting rid of mandatory sentencing on the front end of the system, insist that I am mischaracterizing the bill as a sentencing bill. No, it’s not a sentencing bill, but it is a jailbreak bill on the back end of the justice system, offering multiple avenues for early release.

Also, does this mean my opponents will now agree to scuttle the Lee-Durbin sentencing bill? Of course not. They support that too, but just downplay it in order to pass the aptly named “First Step Act.” Do we really want to facilitate the “next step?” Chuck Grassley, who himself inexplicably got sucked into the Koch jailbreak movement just six months after denouncing it, has committed to attaching the sentencing reduction bill to the First Step Act.

Saving money on prisons while costing the taxpayers billions in property crimes

There’s nothing new about what this bill is proposing. California already tried this. As part of a series of jailbreak proposals, the state passed Prop 47, which dramatically reduced the penalty for drug offenses and property crimes. What are the results? Heather Mac Donald compiled the following data:

In the city of Los Angeles, violent crime rose nearly 20 percent through August 22, 2015, compared with the same period in 2014; property crime was up 11 percent. Shooting victims were up 27 percent. Arrests were down 9 percent. In Santa Ana, felony crime was up 33 percent in May 2015, compared with May 2014. Violent crime was up 28 percent, property crime up 43 percent, and robbery up 89 percent. In nearby Costa Mesa, violent crime increased 47 percent, and theft was up 44 percent, through late July, compared with the same period in 2014. In San Francisco, violent crime was up 13 percent, and property crime up 22 percent, through June 2015 over the previous year.”

Ironically, prison costs have increased in California, even as the state released 30,000 prisoners over the past three years. The moral of the story? When you pursue reduction in prison population at the expense of public safety, you get neither.

Jeffrey L. Sedgwick, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, wrote in the Washington Post in 2008 that that “most conservative estimate for the cost of violent and property crimes in the United States is $17 billion a year — and that’s just direct, immediate cost.” Just a few weeks ago, during National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, the Senate passed a resolution including this very finding from Sedgwick. On the other hand, the entire cost of the Bureau of Prisons is roughly $7 billion.

Supporters of the First Step Act claim that they are basing the model for early release into home confinement programs based off a successful Texas model, not California. However, the numbers they use to calculate recidivism in Texas in order to achieve a lower number only include re-incarcerations, not re-arrests. As we all painfully know, so many arrests never lead to incarceration, particularly in states that are trying to avoid incarceration at all costs. The federal system, on the other hand, measures recidivism by re-arrests. Apples to apples, comparing federal re-arrests to Texas re-arrests, the recidivism rate in Texas is 46.5 percent, 12.5 percent higher than the federal rate, according to the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys who are opposing this bill.

Why would we impose upon the federal system a weaker system of early release programs that have failed in the states?

This bill does not make exceptions for the worst drug traffickers or gun felons in terms of eligibility for early release programs. The data is clear that these people cause more crime when released from prison. Why would we create early release programs with “job training” programs in order to address recidivism when the early release itself is the problem?

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