During last week’s rioting, Chicago police arrested Antonio Harris for looting. He was stealing shoes from a New Balance store.
Who is Antonio Harris? According to Daniel Horowitz, Harris was convicted of first-degree murder in 1999. Instead of life imprisonment, the sentence he would get in a well-functioning criminal justice system, he received a 25-year sentence.
Instead of serving that sentence, as he would in a well-functioning criminal justice system, Harris was let out after serving only half of it.
Since that release less than ten years ago, Harris has been sent back to prison for three felony drug convictions, according to Horowitz. Harris also has a pending felony case of criminal damage to government property.
Let that sink in. Harris, with a 1999 first degree murder conviction and three subsequent felony drug convictions, was on the street last week. America has an under-incarceration problem.
All things considered, Chicago residents should probably feel fortunate that Harris confined his criminal activity last week to stealing shoes, at least as far as we know. Once he’s back on the street — and who knows, maybe he already is — residents might not be so lucky in the future.
The citizenry hasn’t been lucky with Ryan Long of Lincoln, Nebraska. According to Horowitz, Long was arrested on May 15 for drunk driving. At the time, his record was this:
A pending charge in October 2019 for assault and robbery of a man. (He posted just $1,000 to get out of jail a day later.)
A pending charge on January 10, 2020, for allegedly shooting a woman in the thigh with a .22 caliber gun. (Despite the first bond violation, he was out six days later on just $10,000.)
On April 23, 2020, he crashed his vehicle, wrecking an entire block. Police officers found marijuana, an open bottle of Crown Royal, and a BAC of .196 in his vehicle.
How did Long fare in court following his subsequent arrest for drunk driving? He was released four days later after paying just $7,000.
Four days after that, Long was arrested for the murder of Michael Whitemagpie, a 31-year-old black male. If black lives mattered to liberals, the criminally dangerous Long wouldn’t have been free to kill Whitemagpie.
More broadly, if black lives mattered to liberals and jail-break supporting conservatives, they would see to it that criminals who commit felonies — including drug felonies, narcotics being a killer of blacks and whites — serve very long jail sentences. Instead, they are demanding the opposite.
Couple that with the demonizing of the police, which will lead to less proactive policing and thus to fewer arrests of felons, and we can surely expect to see more people like Antonio Harris and Ryan Long roaming the streets and endangering lives — most of them black.
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