Once again, a public official has been threatened near her own home. And once again, the official response was fumbled because of wrongheaded “progressive” notions of criminal justice.
In a scene that sounds quite reminiscent of the attempted June 8 assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Seattle man bearing a handgun was arrested in front of the home of Democratic U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) after threatening to kill her.
One need not approve of Jayapal’s hard-left politics to be appalled by the threat. The political temperature is running way too hot now, and it behooves all of us to tone it down.
That said, the “woke” approach to criminal justice — leniency combined with an unhealthy obsession with “identity politics” — may leave Jayapal less protected going forward than she should be.
That concern stems from two elements of the Seattle-area law enforcement response to the arrest. The first misguided part of that response is the decision as to what crime the armed man should be charged with. Threatening to kill someone is already a crime under Washington state law. Yet the news report says that the arrest was merely for “suspicion of a hate crime” — the “hate” part of it presumably related to the man yelling that Jayapal should “go back to India,” where she grew up.
In short, the arrest was for the hate, not for the threat — the opinion, not the evident intent to kill.
This is nonsense. The threat to Jayapal and her family would have been just as serious if Jayapal were a white person born in the United States. The crime wasn’t in the man’s desire that Jayapal return to India; the crime was in his threat to kill her.
There’s a danger to this. If prosecutors charge the man with the wrong crime, juries are less likely to take that crime seriously.
The larger danger, however, came in a bizarre decision by the judge handling the case. The judge did set an appropriately high bail requirement of $500,000 but strangely denied the request from prosecutors for an anti-harassment protective order to keep this threatening man away from the congresswoman.
The alleged perpetrator remains jailed for now, but if he does post bond without such an order, Jayapal will enjoy one less layer of protection than she should. The man lives within half a mile of Jayapal’s house, so one would think he would continue to be a clear and present threat to her if he finds the resources to make bail.
Alas, this sort of fuzzy thinking has become par for the course in left-wing jurisdictions. When people show themselves to be criminally dangerous to others, the proper response is to use maximum legal leverage to protect their intended targets.
Jayapal, Kavanaugh, and other officials right now must be assumed to be at risk. As the near-assassinations of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) in 2017 and Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) in 2011 both showed, our public servants are vulnerable. Within constitutional limits, it should be incumbent upon prosecutors and judges to throw the book at those who would harm them.
