The last several years have proven that there are too many soft-on-crime judges to justify judges having wide discretion when it comes to freeing criminals. Legislative mandatory minimums and mandatory holds are needed to remove that discretion from judges.
We have another example of a judge putting people’s lives at risk in Chicago. Lawrence Reed is a career criminal who has been arrested 13 times since 2017, having been charged five separate times with battery, along with charges of assault and arson. He has faced 53 criminal cases going back to 1993 and has pleaded guilty to nine felonies in that time. He is exactly the kind of person who should be locked away for life — someone who has proven that he is utterly and completely incapable of functioning in a civilized society.
PORTLAND RESIDENTS AND BUSINESSES ADJUST AS CITY SEES INCREASE IN HOMELESSNESS AND CRIME
And yet, Reed was free on the streets when he allegedly doused a woman on Chicago’s Blue Line train in gasoline and set her on fire. She is clinging to life in a hospital. Reed was free because a judge granted him pretrial release over the objection of prosecutors after he battered a female social worker at the psychiatric hospital in which he was staying. The judge decided that he was too dangerous to stay in that psych ward, but not dangerous enough to be let loose on the public, rejecting the reasonable request by prosecutors to keep him behind bars instead.
REINSTITUTIONALIZING THE HOMELESS
Now, an innocent woman who was simply riding public transit is on the verge of death. There is no universe where someone such as Reed being free to walk the street after a lifetime of violent crime is justified. Time and time again, judges who care more about a criminal’s convenience than about public safety allow violent criminals to go free. The solution, then, is that legislators should impose mandatory minimum sentences for violent criminals and remove the discretion granted to judges that would allow them to release someone such as Reed with nothing more than an ankle monitor while they await trial for yet another violent attack.
This liberal corruption of the justice system needs to be a focus for local Republicans in every state. Red state Republicans must ensure that liberal judges can’t undermine public safety with their pro-criminal ideology. In Illinois, Republicans should use this example to hound Democrats into a debate on this very topic, and Republicans in other blue states should follow suit. Locking someone such as Reed up long before his crime spree reaches this point is a commonsense, popular position, and Republicans should make Democrats answer for cases such as this, where their criminal justice “reform” mindset puts people’s lives in danger.
