Alas, we’ve seen the likes of these stories before: “reimagining”crime and punishment
When I first saw this story two days ago, I thought it was old. It’s not:
The fiend behind Sunday’s bloodbath at a packed Austin bar was an ex-New York City resident wearing a “Property of Allah’’ hoodie — and possibly out for vengeance over the US attack on Iran, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
Crazed Texas shooter Ndiaga Diagne, 53, of Senegal arrived in the US on March 13, 2000 on a B-2 tourist visa during the Democratic Clinton administration and became a lawful permanent resident (IR-6) when he married a US citizen in June 2006, a source familiar with his immigration history told The Post.
Same for this:
A North Carolina man accused of stabbing another individual in broad daylight has faced more than 18 criminal charges over the past decade, including assault-related cases and a domestic-violence conviction, before the latest violent incident, court records show.
Micah Emmanuel Ragin, 31, was charged with assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury after a Feb. 28 altercation in east Charlotte.
Not to mention this terrible one:
A Virginia murder suspect accused of fatally stabbing a woman at a bus stop earlier this week has a lengthy criminal history filled with multiple arrests, but was let back onto the streets nearly every time.
Abdul Jalloh, 32, is charged with the Monday night killing of Stephanie Minter, 41, of Fredericksburg, at a bus stop shelter, the Fairfax County Police Department said. …
He was arrested at a liquor store after an employee called 911. At the time, officers arrested him for allegedly shoplifting. Investigators linked him to the murder a day later.
Authorities were still trying to determine a motive for the killing and what led to the deadly stabbing.
A search of online court records revealed Jalloh has more than a dozen arrests in northern Virginia, including on charges of petty larceny and malicious wounding.
In most of the cases, prosecutors dropped the charges, FOX D.C. reported.
The prosecutors say they dropped charges because the victims often had no fixed address and couldn’t be located. Seems that, in addition to robbing liquor stores, this guy may have usually preyed on the homeless, but until now he never killed anyone. And Sephanie Minter was not homeless.
Oh, and by the way, Jalloh is an illegal alien. Surprise, surprise. He entered the US in 2012, during the Obama years:
His criminal history includes more than 30 arrests for charges of rape, malicious wounding, assault, drug possession, identity theft, trespassing, larceny, firing a weapon, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and pick pocketing.
ICE previously lodged a detainer against Jalloh in 2020, and he was granted a final order of removal by a judge who found he could be removed to any country other than Sierra Leone. This case illustrated the importance of third country removals to get criminal illegal aliens out of the U.S.
And yet he was still here. Plus, guess what? Governor Spanberger of Virginia is still refusing to turn him over to ICE without the feds getting a warrant, which is not legally necessary (see this).
Oh, but there’s more. In connection with the Austin shooting, the officers involved will probably go before a grand jury:
Three hero Austin cops who put their lives on the line to stop a maniac’s deadly shooting rampage are expected to face a grand-jury investigation thanks to a George Floyd-era policy.
Texas lawyer Doug O’Connell, whose firm O’Connell West has been tapped to represent the officers at the behest of the Austin Police Association, told The Post on Tuesday that such mandatory reviews are the brainchild of Austin District Attorney José Garza.
“The district attorney, at the direction of the Wren Collective, insists on presenting every officer involved shooting to a grand jury,’’ O’Connell said, referencing a shadowy and influential left-wing Austin-based criminal-justice reform group.
“We believe that our clients will face this same process,” the lawyer said.
What is the Wren Collective? Here’s their website:
Reimagining the Way Our Country Approaches the Criminal Legal System
Ever notice how often the word “reimagine” is connected with these leftist pipedreams? “Imagine,” indeed – a la the John Lennon song.
The Wren Collective works to transform America’s approach to public safety, expose the weaponization of the legal system, and ensure every person has the chance to participate in civic society. For too long, those with power have exploited the criminal legal system to take away the rights of marginalized communities, people of color, immigrants, and increasingly, their political opponents.
Wren pushes for a world where everyone—not just those with money and power—can live healthy, safe, and dignified lives.
Or where only the powerful can. The rest of you must be sacrificed on the altar of virtue-signaling “reimagination.”
Who funds the Wren Collective? The answer is about what you’d expect:
A consulting firm funded by left-wing billionaires has embedded itself in the offices of 40 progressive prosecutors, where it has quietly helped to craft soft-on-crime policies that now affect 48 million Americans across 22 states. Known as the Wren Collective, the firm provides its services to the prosecutors for free and with no expectation of publicity, according to a new report by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF). …
The Wren Collective is bankrolled by several left-wing billionaires. It received over $500,000 from the Texas billionaire John Arnold, who has invested more than $46 million into progressive criminal justice reform efforts since 2019. The firm also received $295,000 from a group run by disgraced Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King, the Real Justice PAC, and $250,000 from Open Philanthropy, a group run by Cari Tuna, the wife of Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz.
The group worked with some of the most left-wing prosecutors in the country, including former San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, Burlington, Vt., state’s attorney Sarah George, and Monique Worrell, the state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit of Florida. Boudin held weekly “comms huddle up calls with the group”; George worked with Wren Collective to decriminalize prostitution; and George shared confidential case files on a murder case with the Wren Collective before she decided to decline charges in the matter. …
… [Former Portland, Oregon, DA Mike Schmidt’s] office dismissed hundreds of criminal charges against violent protesters involved in the George Floyd riots in Portland shortly after the policy went into effect.
Schmidt, who left office in January, is just one of 40 progressive prosecutors who have worked with the Wren Collective since its creation in early 2020 …
“This is a much deeper problem than people understand,” said LELDF policy director Sean Kennedy, who led the group’s research into the Wren Collective. “Progressive prosecutors are not part of some organic movement. They are simply the face of a carefully designed and highly coordinated campaign to undermine the American criminal justice system from within. Our research shows that donors fund the production, activists write the script, the Wren Collective directs the scene, and their client prosecutors dutifully act out their parts.”
We already knew that Soros was involved with funding the campaigns of so many of these DAs. But I don’t recall reading about the Wren Collective before, although it seems to coordinate the whole thing.
In the 60s, leftists used to have to rob banks or people to get money. No more! And you can bet that their wealthy funders have plenty of security; they’re not riding light rail or waiting at bus stops.
FBI data are clear: POC’s violent crime rate is way above that of us whities.But the Dems subserviently cater to them.
I wonder how many Austin residents voted for their legal system to be running Grand Jury proceedings under the direction of a Soros-funded NGO?
The tech moguls design addictive software, addictive social media apps and become obscenely wealthy while their “products” destroy interpersonal and societal relationships. They then use their wealth to facilitate predation of the public by criminals.
Some just want to burn it all down.
For the grater, (intentional, not greater) stabby, good.
P.S. Austin voters, University of Texas, malignant empathy, case in piont.
Didn’t Dostoevsky already do the classic job of imagining “Crime and Punishment”?
I say, stick with the classics. The woke folks could learn a thing or two from C&P.
Thinking of my use of Cloward-Piven as a verb;
Suppose this got so bad that gangs of vigilantes sprang up, out of desperation to protect their families and neighbors,
This would “justify” a massive crackdown from government, setting the Constitution aside to “protect public order”, and the regime is never lifted. Since even complaining about it would be actionable.
Yes and Somails in Greater Mogidishu demand reparations for fraud-related investigation anxiety.
When will Tucker, Candace, and Meghan hear their lamentations and take up their cause? The Somalis certainly aren’t Jews after all.
Not a lawyer, but I have long heard in Texas that if you are officially ” No Billed ” by a grand jury after a justified homicide, you cannot be charged again.
The problem is, the DA is a lefty drawing from a lefty jury pool.
Va. Governor Spanberger is trying to establish the precedent that a judicial warrant is a requirement for releasing an illegal to ICE. It’s a tactic designed to create conditions so cumbersome that deportations grind to a halt.
“Progressive prosecutors are not part of some organic movement. They are simply the face of a carefully designed and highly coordinated campaign to undermine the American criminal justice system from within.”
What ‘progressives’ utterly fail to grasp is that they’re sawing off the very high branch upon which they’re sitting. They are blind to what they risk.
“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” Proverbs 14:12 & 16:25
According to Powerline the Austin DA will not send the officers before a grand jury after hearing “intense criticism”.
From Richard Aubrey (above): “Suppose this got so bad that gangs of vigilantes sprang up, out of desperation to protect their families and neighbors,…”
Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution provides Congress the authority to issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal, allowing privateers to profitably campaign for supporting the goals of the United States. In fact, there have been discussions regarding issuing Letters of Marque and Reprisal against Mexican drug cartels.
States in the U.S. do not have the authority to issue such letters, but states
do have the authority to empower Fugitive Recovery Agents,or Bail Enforcement Agents, aka “Bounty Hunters” and most states, but not all, can authorize that action.
What if a state, or states, were to fund turn-ins of illegal aliens and pass laws authorizing authorized agents to detain, arrest and turn-in illegals for bounties? Accompanied, of course, by stringent requirements and severe penalties for “going out of bounds.” Could be a lucrative line of business.
I should take a crack at Crime and Punishment some day.
Our Marxists just as the Bolsheviks did love crime, just not against the state. But to the population have at it. Crime creates kaos and feeds the revolution.
The Venn Diagrm of:
People with more money than sense;
People who strongly advocate for population control;
People who want to “reimagine criminal justice”;
is a totally overlapping circle.
What better way to reduce the population than by allowing criminals to go about unmolested by icky police? Once one eliminates enough of the hoi polloi, the world will be so very much nicer a place in which to indulge oneself.
I read about half of the paper (prepared by a law enforcement group) exposing Wren. One prominent progressive prosecutor that has close ties is our own Larry Krasner. For anyone paying attention, or otherwise n the know, the Wren organization is just one of countless actors advancing progressive policies, including in the criminal justice world.
It’s such a nightmare, it’s opposite-land, to find these anti-law enforcement candidates easily winning elections to become the premier law enforcement authority in their jurisdictions. They just walk right into office, and keep winning reelection.
On a smaller point, notice the article describing how one state attorney general improperly shared confidential criminal files with Wren. We have a similar situation in Philadelphia, where a high-up assistant district attorney worked closely with an organization within NYU law school, as the law school prepared a long “expose” of the alleged decades-long corruption practiced by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office before Krasner was elected. It was discovered that she had made the DAs confidential files freely available to this outside advocacy organization.
This is unheard of and leaves the files open to contamination, to real evidence being destroyed or altered. There have been no repercussions.
By the way, I read the NYU report. It’s rubbish. Completely misrepresents the facts of the numerous convictions that have been attacked by groups such as The Innocence Project—and Krasner. Numerous not-innocent murderers have thus been let out of prison, and awarded millions of dollars by the city for their supposed unjust incarceration.
Given the way these thugs work, that mendacious org. would HAVE to be called something like the INNOCENCE Project.
Kinda like Soros’s Open Democracy(?) Foundation (heh) or Zuckerberg’s Transparency Whatever.
Etc…
As they say, for these gangsters “1984” is a How-To manual…and grift, thievery and destroying the social order is their virtue.
Think of it as “reparations” on a massive, societal scale.
(Or CRISIS, Inc. AKA Cloward-Piven Productions…)
Norman,
Letters of Marque generally presume a potential for profit and some version of a prize court.
Neither would be the case when the government C-Ps the populace into desperate vigilantiism.
Ahh, the Wren Collective is defined by its self-determined name: “Collective” means “Communist”.
What differentiates malicious wounding from benign wounding?
The gender madness victims (sex reassignment) don’t think there is a difference at all.
But you can’t put back what the knife or the drugs wielded by the surgeons and psychiatrists/psychologists have severed or stopped.
These people remind you that the left is malevolent and persistently so.
Just FYI: the district attorney Jose Garza — anti-cop, social justice warrior — is the Travis County DA, not Austin DA.
So he has spread even broader damage. Much blood on his hands!
Austin is in Travis county.
I voted against Garza as hard and often as I could.