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Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman is finding he can’t outrun the issue of crime in his increasingly competitive race against Republican Mehmet Oz. That is because Fetterman’s record on crime is abysmal, and he is mostly proud of it.
Fetterman’s campaign has walked back his support of releasing all convicted second-degree murderers serving life without parole. He had previously said in a taped interview that he wanted a conversation that “would free close to 1,200 people.” At the time, there were 1,166 people in Pennsylvania serving life sentences without parole for second-degree murder. Fetterman’s campaign now says he does not support what he explicitly said he supported.
But Fetterman is otherwise proud of supporting the release of murderers. In 2019, the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons (which Fetterman chairs) unanimously approved the release of Charles Goldblum. Goldblum and an accomplice, Charles Miller, had lured George Wilhelm into a parking garage in 1976, where Miller stabbed him 26 times. Goldblum later admitted that he and Miller burned down his restaurant and that Wilhelm knew about their involvement. While Goldblum was out on bond in 1976 awaiting trial, he also attempted to have Miller killed so he could not testify against him.
In spite of all this, Fetterman’s campaign has boasted about releasing Goldblum.
Fetterman also voted to free Wayne Covington, a man who shot and killed 18-year-old George Rudnycky while attempting to rob him for drug money. Rudnycky pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. Fetterman couches his soft-on-crime stance with talk of how no one should stay in prison for life if they “did not take a life,” but it turns out he also means it for those who did take a life.
If that is not enough, Fetterman’s latest appointment to the board perfectly personifies his stance. Fetterman appointed Celeste Trusty, who tweeted of convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal, “I love mumia! he’s my buddy … he’s like an uncle to a bunch of my friends who were on the row with him.”
Abu-Jamal murdered police officer Daniel Faulkner, shooting him in the back and the head during a traffic stop in which he had pulled over Abu-Jamal’s brother. He was initially sentenced to death.
These are the kinds of people that deserve sympathy in Fetterman’s ideal criminal justice system: an insurance fraudster who was a part of one homicide and attempted to solicit another, a first-degree murderer who killed a teenager for drug money, and a convicted cop killer.
Fetterman cannot run from his record, in part because he has boasted about it so much. He thinks that criminals are the victims in our justice system, not the actual victims. He wants to see the criminals set free as early as possible, no matter how violent their crimes. Fetterman is among the left-wing Democrats who want to remove justice from the criminal justice system. He belongs nowhere near power.
