With his defendant-friendly prosecutors facing pushback and even recall elections, left-wing financier George Soros recently felt the need to defend his criminal justice agenda, claiming, “Like most of us, I’m concerned about crime.”
If that’s true, he has a very funny way of showing it.
Soros’s essay was supposed to defend and justify his backing of prosecutors who are extraordinary for being soft on crime. But time and again, such prosecutors have shown that their philosophy is inconsistent with justice. Again and again, they release violent career criminals who victimize ordinary citizens going about their business.
Soros donated to one prosecutor in Fairfax County, Virginia, who needlessly released a man who went on a spree shooting homeless people up and down the East Coast. The alleged perpetrator, Gerald Brevard, had been apprehended for abduction and attempted rape, but Soros-backed prosecutor Steve Descano let him plead down to lesser charges and even dropped several slam-dunk charges that police later brought against him for a separate incident. As a direct result of Descano’s decisions, Brevard was free and out on the street when the homeless shootings occurred. Blood is on his hands and on those of his donor.
Similarly, Soros-backed state’s attorney Kim Foxx of Cook County, Illinois, deliberately avoided charging an alleged drug dealer with gun possession last month, even after he was caught with $8,000 worth of marijuana and an illegal gun. Torrence Reese had beaten a drug dealing-related murder rap as recently as 2017. In the eyes of the law, he is, of course, innocent of that charge. But Foxx’s office, which prosecuted him in that case ostensibly believing him to be quite guilty, chose voluntarily, without any prompting from a judge or any negotiation with a defense team, to pretend the gun just wasn’t there.
It turns out that liberals like passing gun control legislation much more than they enjoy enforcing it.
Soros correctly identifies it as a problem that $81 billion is spent annually incarcerating people in the United States. There are many situations, especially with first-time offenders, minor offenses, and nonviolent or victimless crimes, in which leniency is in order and long prison sentences unnecessary and unhelpful. This is why then-President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act, a landmark law as regards criminal sentencing reform.
Until recently, people of all political stripes supported criminal justice reform. But there cannot be a more clueless person on Earth than Soros when it comes to solving the problem he identifies. The problem with Soros-backed prosecutors is that they consistently support releasing and pleading down the worst and most violent career criminals, heedless of the consequences to the communities they prey upon.
The current spike in crime in some of the nation’s formerly beautiful cities serves as a testament to Soros’s folly. It is genuinely saddening and pathetic to see district attorneys such as Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, who routinely lets violent criminals out without bail but goes to the mat in order to persecute those who exercise the God-given right of self-defense against those same violent criminals who are being released without bail.
Soros claims to have seen academic studies showing that his handpicked prosecutors are not the cause of the spike in crime that is occurring chiefly in the cities where they operate. He even claims, without offering any specifics, that “murder rates have been rising fastest in some Republican states led by tough-on-crime politicians.”
We would like to direct his attention to Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities where his money has gone toward preventing justice for the victims of hardened career criminals. Soros claims that he is backing an agenda “based on both common sense and evidence.” People watching Los Angeles’s George Gascon and Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner release violent repeat offenders in their cities are not fooled by this. Although Soros did not fund Chesa Boudin, it is instructive to see that the former San Francisco district attorney’s similar philosophy has been repudiated by the voters of the Golden City despite their legendary left-wing leanings.
Criminal justice reform was once popular and bipartisan. But Soros and his soft-on-crime prosecutors have been busy destroying the consensus that previously existed behind it. By applying leniency when completely inappropriate and letting predators loose on their communities, he is killing off any chance for genuine common sense to rule the day and mete out justice with appropriate mercy.
