Category Archives: Crime

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Killadelphia A 15-year-old was killed, possibly as a result of an earlier fist fight.

A 12-year-old, the son of criminals, takes a shot at the police, and winds up dead. A 15-year-old is arrested for shooting at teenaged girls in a fleeing car, hitting two of them, and the police say that he is a suspect in two other shootings as well. A 17-year-old is accused of shooting and killing a Temple University student in a botched robbery.

Is it any wonder that Philadelphians are applying for concealed carry permits at a record-breaking pace?

    13-year-old boy shot in head in West Philly

    The victim was sitting alone in a car at 49th and Hoopes Streets when someone started shooting shortly before 8:30 p.m., police said.

    by Robert Moran | Monday, April 4, 2022 | 9:55 PM EDT

    A 13-year-old boy was hospitalized in critical condition after he was shot in the head Monday night in the Mill Creek section of West Philadelphia, police said.

    The shooting was reported shortly before 8:30 p.m. at 49th and Hoopes Street.

4931 Hoopes Street, listed for sale at $125,000, from Zillow.com.

Hoopes Street consists almost entirely of two-story row homes, in not the best or repair, and 49th in that area is no better, yet people are being charged $1,195 a month to rent these marginal residences, at least according to this listing on Zillow. A vacant lot at 4935 Hoopes Street is being listed for $50,000, while this disaster at 4931 Hoopes is being listed for $125,000.[1]Here are the other three photos of 4931 Hoopes Street, from the current Zillow listing. Those photos will eventually disappear from the listing if that dump is ever sold. No wonder people in this neighborhood have little hope; they’re being robbed just to live in dumps! Yet it was a neighborhood which got a 13-year-old boy shot in the head; what could have been worth that in that neighborhood?

    The boy, who lives in the neighborhood, was sitting alone in the front passenger seat of an Acura SUV when someone approached the car from that side and opened fire, said Capt. John Walker, commanding officer of the Shooting Investigation Group.

The police believe that the victim was personally targeted, and several shots were fired at him. As of Tuesday morning, Fox29 is reporting that the victim is still “fighting for his life,” so he is not a current homicide statistic.

What does it say that I have quite reasonably referred to a 13-year-old boy as a “statistic”?

A 15-year-old boy was shot dead in the city earlier in the day, and police said that at least 20 shots had been fired in the confrontation. Fox29 reported, that a law enforcement source said that investigators believe the shooting may have stemmed from a fist fight earlier in the day.

At some point it has to be asked: what can a 15-year-old, an eighth grader, and a 13-year-old have done to have caused their enemies to hunt them down and assassinate them in deliberate, targeted killings? One murder was possibly a revenge engagement from a fist fight? If that’s the case, then investigators will know with whom the fist fight occurred, and he’ll be caught. One kid is dead, and another will be locked up, hopefully for the rest of his miserable life, behind a fist fight?

In just the first three days of April, ten people, all of them black, were shot in the city, two fatally, and it’s nothing other than routine in the City of Brotherly Love. 125 people have been murdered in Philly as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday, April 4th, and April 4th in 2021 was the end of a weekend.

Also read: The Philadelphia Inquirer: ‘I just need to know why.’ Mother pleads for answers in the slaying of son, 15.

This is a cultural thing, an urban culture which glorifies carrying guns to the point that adolescents are doing so, exhibiting the quick, responsive, irresponsible and immature judgement of adolescents, and other adolescents are frequently the victims when these kids start firing away. But no one will ask why this is the case, no one will even acknowledge that this could be the result of an urban culture, because that will lead to the obvious point: this is a primarily black phenomenon, and to point out that is raaaaacist.

It ought to be obvious: you cannot address a problem, and certainly cannot solve a problem, if you will not admit the problem, if you cannot discuss the problem, and no one wants to do that, not with this problem. The political, intellectual, and journalistic leaders in the city would rather ignore the problem, would rather see the killing continue, than to risk being labeled racists by doing the very radical thing of just telling the truth.

We have previously noted that not only does The Philadelphia Inquirer decline to print such news itself, but has criticized other media for reporting the news the editors of the Inquirer believe should be ignored.

Of course, the people of Philly know that the problem of killings in the city is a largely black problem; just because the Inquirer specifically, and the rest of the media more generally, try to obscure that doesn’t mean that the public are unaware. When Philadelphians hear that these killings are happening in Kensington or North Philadelphia or Strawberry Mansion or around Temple University or in West Philly, they know that these are heavily black neighborhoods. The primarily law-abiding black residents in those areas have to dread what can happen on their streets, and the wealthier white liberals don’t need to care, because Chestnut Hill and Rittenhouse Square just don’t experience that violence. The truth is that black lives don’t matter, not in Philadelphia, at least they don’t matter enough to address the problems.

References

References
↑1 Here are the other three photos of 4931 Hoopes Street, from the current Zillow listing. Those photos will eventually disappear from the listing if that dump is ever sold.
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Lexington prosecutor Lou Anna Red Corn lets another killer off leniently

Lou Anna Red Corn, from her official biography page, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

On January 10, 2022, James Edward Ragland II, 31, was sentenced to ten years in the state penitentiary for shooting and killing Iesha Edwards, 27, outside what Lexington Herald-Leader euphemistically called a “gentleman’s club.” Originally charged with murder, Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn allowed Mr Edwards to plead down to manslaughter.

On January 19, 2022, Malachi Jackson, now 20 but 16 at the time of his crime, charged with the murder of 15-year-old Kevin Olmeda, was allowed by Miss Red Corn to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault, and first-degree criminal attempt to commit robbery. With a recommended sentence of 15 years by the prosecution, time already served taken into account, and the state minimum of 85% of sentence required, Mr Jackson could be out of jail by the age of 31.

On February 11, 2022, Jemel Barber, 23, was sentenced to twenty years for the killing of 40-year-old Tyrece Clark. Mr Barber was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter and second-degree robbery, down from murder, by Miss Red Corn, and if he serves his full sentence, including time already served, he could be out by age 39.

On March 11, 2022, Xavier Hardin, 21, was allowed by Miss Red Corn to plead guilty to manslaughter, assault and wanton endangerment charges in the killing of Kenneth Bottoms Jr., 17, and charges of murder were dropped. The shooting was caught on security tape in Fayette Mall.

And here she goes again!

    Lexington man gets 10 years in prison after pleading guilty in a deadly shooting

    by Christopher leach | Friday, April 1, 2022 | 10:23 AM EDT

    The man who shot and killed a 44-year-old man in March 2020 was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Friday.

    Seantel Watson, via WKYT-TV.

    Seantel Watson, 34, was originally charged with murder for shooting and killing Larry Steven Rose Jr. but was convicted of a lesser charge. Watson turned himself in one week after the deadly shooting. The charge was amended down to manslaughter when Watson accepted a guilty plea deal on Feb. 14, nearly two years after the shooting. The shooting took place on Smith Street near Transylvania University on March 6, 2020.

    A call of shots fired came in shortly after 3 p.m. and Rose was pronounced dead just over 30 minutes later.

Prosecutors recommended he be sentenced to ten years, which Judge Thomas Travis accepted. The murderer manslaughterer received credit for the slightly more than two years he has already spent behind bars. Mr Watson, 34, if released after serving the state minimum of 85% of his sentence, could get out when he’s just 40 years old. His victim will still be dead.

I have to ask: at what point does the Commonwealth’s Attorney start prosecuting murderers for murder? At what point does Miss Red Corn stop treating killers leniently?

Oh, wait, I already know: Miss Red Corn will prosecute Bemjamin William Call to the full extent of the law, because he is accused of beating John Abner Tyler to death in a Lexington parking garage. The Herald-Leader ran four separate, sympathetic stories about the victim. Mr Abner was not another black male with a shady past, or a black dancer at a strip club, but a white man ‘married’ to another white man.

In Lexington, the sentence for killing someone depends on whom was killed.

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A public service homicide It shouldn't be any surprise the Philly has become like the Wild, Wild West, when the sheriff has apparently left town

The initial reports were that the store owner shot and killed a would-be robber in the City of Brotherly Love. After the initial, confused reports, things were clarified:

    Armed robbery suspect shot, killed by customer in North Philadelphia store, police say

    Fox 29 News | Wednesday, March 30, 2022 | 1:42 PM EDT | Updated 5:41 PM EDT

    Crime scene. Photo via Steve Keeley, Foxn29 News.

    PHILADELPHIA – Authorities say a suspected armed robber was shot and killed by a customer at a North Philadelphia corner store Wednesday afternoon.

    Officers from the Philadelphia Police Department were called to the 1400 block of Master Street around noon for reports of a shooting.

    A police source told FOX 29’s Jennifer Joyce that two young men wearing masks entered the store and approached a man in his 23-year-old man waiting for a food order. One of the robbers hit the man in the head with the gun and a struggle began.

    The robber handed the gun to his accomplice at which point law enforcement sources said the customer shot the armed robber twice in the abdomen. The customer is licensed to carry a firearm, according to police sources.

    The suspect was taken to Temple University Hospital by responding officers but later succumbed to his injuries. The second robber fled the store after the shooting and has not been captured.

    Law enforcement sources say the customer was released and is unlikely to be charged. The entire incident was captured on store surveillance that has already been turned over to investigators.

When I checked the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page on Thursday morning, I found the number of killings unchanged since the previous day, which means that the Department did not consider the killing of this thug to be a crime. Some of us might even consider it a public service.

I had figured that, being a day later, even The Philadelphia Inquirer ought to have something on this story, but, unless I completely missed it, there was no story on it on either the newspaper’s website main page or specific crime page.

The bodega in which the shooting occurred is on the corner of Master and 15th Streets, close to Temple University, and it isn’t a slum. Rather, 15th Street is lined with fairly new construction three-and-four-story residences, with the look of having been constructed to house Temple students.

We noted, just a couple of weeks ago, that applications for concealed carry permits in Philadelphia had surged, and the reasons are clear: the city is not protecting citizens from the gang-bangers and the criminal class, and the public increasingly feel the need to protect themselves. When the District Attorney, a George Soros stooge, won’t prosecute crimes, won’t put the bad guys behind bars, what real choice do Philadelphians have?

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Killadelphia When will Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw be held accountable for the chaos in Philadelphia?

What I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. doesn’t like to print stories about the murders in the city, because so many of them are one gang-banger, almost always black, shooting another gang-banger, the victim again almost always black. But the newspaper does love to do stories about innocent people being killed, so it is with some surprise it took until Monday for the Inquirer to get around to this story; WPVI-TV, Channel 6, had it on Friday.

    A 15-year-old boy, shot in Wissinoming while getting a case of water bottles from his dad’s car, has died

    Sean Toomey was shot in the head outside his family’s home on the 6200 block of Mulberry Street.

    by Chris Palmer | Monday, March 28, 2022

    Sean Toomey, photo from Tweet by Jaclyn Lee, 6ABC News.

    A 15-year-old boy who was shot in the head in Wissinoming last week while grabbing a case of water bottles from his father’s car has died, according to his family and Philadelphia police.

    Sean Toomey, of the 6200 block of Mulberry Street, was shot around 9:10 p.m. Thursday outside his family’s house on that block, police said.

    His aunt, Anna Toomey, said Monday that the teen had been inside the house before going out to retrieve the case of water when he was shot and collapsed on a neighbor’s lawn.

    Officers who responded took him to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital, where he was initially placed in critical condition. He was pronounced dead on Friday afternoon, police said Monday.

WPVI’s report noted:

    That woman called her boyfriend for help and by the time that boyfriend got outside, police say the two suspects ran off – but then shots were fired. Police have ruled out the boyfriend.

    “I heard the two pops and I thought it was firecrackers,” said Sean’s father, John. “But it only takes a second to grab some water and get in the house and he wasn’t coming back in. So I got curious, I put my sweatshirt on, and I went outside and I saw him lying on my neighbor’s lawn.”

    That’s when Toomey discovered his own son had been shot, once in the head, once in the side.

There’s more at the originals.

Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said on Monday that the police believe that the killing was related to a group of three men who had attempted at least two other robberies in the area just prior to the shooting. Though initial reports stated that young Mr Toomey was struck by bullets fired after the previous robbery attempts, police have not ruled out the possibility that the criminals tried to rob Mr Toomey personally.

    Police said three other people were slain over the weekend: A 28-year-old man was found dead from several gunshot wounds on the 400 block of Kingsley Street, in Wissahickon, around 11:50 p.m. Sunday; a 30-year-old man died after being shot on the 800 block of East Willard Street in Kensington around 11 p.m. Sunday; and 33-year-old Eric Sampson, of West Philadelphia, was fatally shot around 12:20 a.m. Friday on the 3500 block of Kensington Avenue in Kensington.

The Inquirer article stated that no arrests have been made in any of the homicide cases.

There have been 120 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, March 27th. That’s a 3.45% increase over the same date in record-shattering 2021, and 31.87% higher than in 2020, which was second all-time in in city murders with 499. The statistics are too close to state that 2022 will break 2021’s record of 562 homicides, but it seems almost certain that the 500 number will be eclipsed.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, there have been 121 murders through Sunday in the Windy City, one more than in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, but the guesstimated population of Chicago is 2,671,635, while 1,576,251 people live in Philly.

At some point it has to be asked: when will Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw be held accountable for the chaos in Philadelphia? These people have failed, utterly failed, in their jobs.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to ramp up sympathy for the drunk driver who killed three men

Jayana Webb mugshot, via Fox29 News.

On early Monday morning, March 21, 2022, 21-year-old Jayana Webb killed 29-year-old Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Brendan Sisca, 33-year-old State Trooper Martin Mack, and 28-year-old electrician Reyes Rivera Oliveras. No, Miss Webb didn’t pull a gun and shoot them; she used a Chevy Captiva.

    On I-95, four lives converged in a crash that left three dead and a young person facing steep consequences

    Communities are mourning the deaths of two Pennsylvania State Police troopers and a ‘happy’ man. The driver’s friends are reckoning with her alleged crimes.

    by Ryan W. Briggs , Rodrigo Torrejón, and Max Marin | Friday, March 25, 2022 | 7:52 PM EDT

The story begins with brief biographies of the slain State Troopers and Mr Oliveras, which you can see if you follow the link to the Philadelphia Inquirer original. I have omitted quoting that part here, because I don’t want to cross the line into plagiarism. It’s further down that the infuriating part begins:

    Then there was Jayana Webb, 21, a track star-turned-hair stylist, barreling toward them in a silver Chevy Captiva.

    At 12:47 a.m., Webb wrote on Twitter that she had been stopped “doing 110 in a 50″ mile-per-hour zone. While state police have neither confirmed nor denied the stop, multiple news outlets reported that Mack and Sisca stopped the woman for speeding on the interstate that night.

    Around the time of the tweet, state police said the troopers were abruptly redirected to assist a man apparently attempting to cross the highway near Lincoln Financial Field. The troopers bolted south, and found Oliveras.

In other words, Miss Webb was about to get away with going 60 MPH over the speed limit. That’s more than just speeding; that’s reckless driving. Unfortunately, reckless did not translate into wreckless.

    Webb, who prosecutors said admitted to drinking Hennessy cognac that night, proceeded south on I-95 and crashed into the three men at such a speed that the impact ripped the doors off their stopped state police SUV and sent the troopers flying over a highway divider.

The troopers and Mr Oliveras were in the left hand median; to have struck them, Miss Webb had to have been driving down the “hammer” lane, the left-hand passing lane. She got away with speeding, and she was speeding again.

    All three men were pronounced dead shortly afterward. Webb and a passenger survived, and, according to police audio recordings, attempted to walk away but were escorted back to the scene.

    The ensuing investigation shut down I-95 for nearly eight hours, as investigators attempted to piece together what happened. But days later, why Oliveras was on I-95 at 1 a.m. Monday, and how Webb came to be speeding toward him and the troopers, remain largely a mystery.

It’s not a mystery how Miss Webb came speeding toward the scene: she got away with the initial stop by sheer dumb luck, and then used that luck to prove how dumb she really is.

    Webb now faces three counts of third-degree murder and potentially decades in prison. Her friends are reckoning with how a popular and promising young entrepreneur ended up in jail without bail over the deaths of three men.

“(A) popular and promising young entrepreneur”, huh? Here the Inquirer is trying to humanize her, to make her sympathetic character, not a killer, not a murderess, but just some poor thing who happened to make a mistake.

    Image of tweet, via Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

    By the time Webb’s mugshot hit national news, she had already shown indications of reckless driving. Tweets from before the crash quickly emerged in which she bragged about drinking and driving. One January post read: “If you ask me, I’m the best drunk driver ever.”

    Some in her social circle, meanwhile, were in shock. How could Webb — a track-and-field star with no past DUIs and a hair-braiding business — be responsible for the deaths of three people?

    Some said Webb deserves what’s coming. Others, sometimes posting under the hashtag “#TeamJay,” said Webb made a terrible error, egged on by a pervasive culture of casual drunk driving.

    “What she did was not right,” said a friend, who spoke to the The Inquirer on condition of anonymity due to the high-profile nature of the case. “But at the same time we’re all human and we all make mistakes.”

Jayana Webb perp walk, via Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original, and it’s utterly disgusting. The Inquirer let us know what a wonderful person she really was, someone who just happened to get caught up in a culture of drinking, partying hearty, and driving drunk. Remember: the Inquirer also tried to make a martyr out of 12-year-old Thomas Siderio, Jr, who fired a shot at Philadelphia Police officers, and wrote about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes as though he was an innocent kid just walking to school, when he was not.

It’s really not her fault, you know, she just made a mistake.

A mistake that left three men, three men with families, three apparently hard-working men, stone cold graveyard dead.

The joy that Miss Webb apparently found in doing 110 MPH on I-95, in “tearing up Kelly Drive,” was not mirrored in her face during her perp walk. Even soft-hearted and soft-headed District Attorney Larry Krasner can’t let this slide, though he’ll probably go for sentences less than the maximum. The penalty for third-degree murder in Pennsylvania is 10 to 20 years in prison. Three consecutive 20-year sentences puts her behind bars until she’s 81 years old, but we all know that Mr Krasner won’t go for that. Watch for a lenient plea bargain from the District Attorney.

Me? I have exactly zero sympathy here. If Miss Webb is found guilty, she should get out of jail when Troopers Sisca and Mack and Mr Oliveras come back to life.

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A very minor omission in The Philadelphia Inquirer The difference between journalism and journolism

I use the term ‘journolism’ to refer to heavily biased reporting. It’s not a misspelling: my of spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. Many times biased journalism comes not from stating something false, but the omission of pertinent information, and boy, did Philadelphia Inquirer writers Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla do that here!

    Chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

    Philly had its largest one-year population decline since 1975: See charts that show the factors

    The drop in total population follows almost a decade of population growth for Philadelphia.

    by Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla | Friday, March 25, 2022

    Philadelphia lost almost 25,000 residents in a year, according to new census data looking at a full year of the pandemic released Thursday.

    The drop in total population between July 2020 and July 2021 is the largest one-year decline since 1975 and follows almost a decade of population growth for Philadelphia, which topped 1.6 million residents in 2020. The losses were driven primarily by the residents who moved out of the city, which exceeded the number of people moving into Philly.

    In the U.S. Census Bureau’s 12-month snapshot, Philly saw the highest disparity since 2001 between people moving in and those moving out. That difference led to a net loss of more than 28,000 residents, doubling what census numbers showed for the year prior.

There’s a lot more at the original, which you can read by following the link embedded in the headline.

The article gives some of the reasons for the city’s guesstimated population loss:

  1. A desire to flee crowded urban centers, something which will disappoint the global warming climate change activists, who see pushing more people into urban areas as a way to decrease CO2 emissions due to automobile traffic.
  2. Young adults moving back in with parents, in part due to the recession caused by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Philadelphia persisted with restrictions after many other areas had dropped them, though much of that occurred after the data for this study was collected.
  3. More affluent residents leaving to second homes; the article makes no mention as to why such people wouldn’t be counted among current population numbers if they did not sell their city homes.
  4. City dwellers leaving cosmopolitan life in exchange for green space. The COVID-19 shutdowns and lockdowns produced a greater desire for having your own backyard.
  5. Immigration into the city decreased while President Trump was in office, but the article suggests that it will increase again now that Joe Biden is in office.
  6. A significant narrowing of the gap between live births and deaths.

The article writers noted that the population estimates are not as accurate as the actual census counts, so the data are at least questionable.

But despite the “few possible factors driving the Philly departures” given, one was conspicuous in its absence: the writers never mentioned Philadelphia’s huge crime rate! 2020, the first year of the panicdemic pandemic, saw the city’s homicide numbers jump from 356 in 2019 — which was already the highest since 2007 — to 499, good for second place all time, and only one short of the record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. Then, in 2021, that record was blown to smithereens, with 562 murders.

The police were hobbled by a social and racial justice prosecutor who is more interested in finding malfeasance among the police than he is with prosecuting actual criminals, the idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protests which further alienated the population from the police, and the Inquirer itself, which, under “anti-racist” publisher Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes and new Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar, has editorial policies very much in tune with District Attorney Larry Krasner’s philosophy of soft-peddling crime stories because they might negatively impact and stereotype the black community in the city.

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 115 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, March 24th, three more than the same date last year, meaning that Philadelphia is on a path to come very close to, and possibly exceeding, the 562 record. Fortunately, the latest man killed was a criminal attempting to rob a Dollar General store, shot dead by the store manager after the would-be robber made threatening moves with what turned out to be a toy gun in his jacket pocket.

As Robert Stacy McCain would say, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

    In other gun violence Thursday night, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the head and right side of his body around 9:10 p.m. in the city’s Wissinoming section, police said.

    The shooting occurred in the area of Mulberry and Devereaux Streets. The teen was taken by police to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital. He was reported in extremely critical condition.

    Police received preliminary information that two males suspected in the shooting also attempted a gunpoint robbery a short time earlier in Mayfair.

Philadelphians see stories like this every day, perhaps not in the Inquirer, but the local television stations carry the stories. In a city in which the quality of life is spiraling downward, in which the voters have just re-elected a softer-than-soft on crime District Attorney, in which Dollar General store managers feel the need to carry a firearm to protect his employees and himself because, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, how is it that three well-educated and well-paid Inquirer reporters can simply omit the fact that Philadelphia is wracked with crime and violence as one possible reason that people are moving away?

Well, perhaps I’m being unfair in blaming the three reporters; it’s entirely possible that they did include it, but Editor Gabriel Escobar or one of his minions blue penciled it.[1]Yes, I know: I’m showing my age! But, whoever is responsible is showing the journolism of the Inquirer, while Mr Escobar and Miss Hughes and the Lenfest Institute which owns the paper scratch their heads, wondering why the newspaper is losing readers.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I know: I’m showing my age!
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So, who failed here? It seems that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson isn't the only one being soft on child porn sentences

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record of sentencing child pornography case offenders to below the minimum in federal sentencing guidelines looks like something that even Joe Biden wouldn’t have been stupid enough to ignore before nominating her to the Supreme Court, if he knew about it, so the obvious question becomes: who in the Administration failed to discover this during the vetting process?

That, at least, was what I thought when I first heard about this pattern of sentencing. Then I read this article, and it isn’t pretty:

Fact check: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson child porn sentences ‘pretty mainstream’

Monday, March 21, 2022 | 9:02 PM EDT

Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson open this week amid a flurry of misleading allegations by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley that the nominee has a “long record” of letting child porn offenders “off the hook” during sentencing.

“In every single child porn case for which we can find records, Judge Jackson deviated from the federal sentencing guidelines in favor of child porn offenders,” Hawley tweeted Thursday, highlighting nine cases from her time as a federal District Court judge.

How, I have to ask, are Senator Hawley’s “allegations” that Judge Jackson “has a ‘long record’ of letting child porn offenders ‘off the hook’ during sentencing” “misleading”? Did she, or didn’t she impose more lenient sentences on convicted child porn offenders?

While court records show that Jackson did impose lighter sentences than federal guidelines suggested, Hawley’s insinuation neglects critical context, including the fact that the senator himself has voted to confirm at least three federal judges who also engaged in the same practice.

Oh, so she did do what the distinguished gentleman from Missouri said that she did.

Federal appeals court Judges Joseph Bianco of the Second Circuit and Andrew Brasher of the Eleventh Circuit, both Trump appointees, had each previously sentenced defendants convicted of possessing child pornography to prison terms well below federal guidelines at the time they were confirmed with Hawley’s support, an ABC review of court records found.

Asked about the votes Monday by ABC News, Sen. Hawley made clear he has never supported a high court nominee with a similar record in child porn sentencing cases. “Not for this court I haven’t, not for the U.S. Supreme Court,” Hawley told ABC’s Rachel Scott when asked whether his criticism of Judge Jackson presented a double standard.

Hawley said he would not consider a below-guidelines child porn sentence “acceptable” from a nominee and suggested that he was not aware of the times Judges Bianco and Brasher and a third judge, Carl Nichols of the D.C. District Court, had rendered such judgments.

Apparently ‘what aboutism’ is the defense being used to support Judge Jackson on this. If Senator Hawley knew about such in the record of previous nominees for whom he voted, then shame on him, but it is obvious that nominees for lower courts don’t receive the same type of delving into their records that Supreme Court nominees do.

Skipping down a few paragraphs, we come to this:

“If and when we properly contextualize Judge Jackson’s sentencing record in federal child porn cases, it looks pretty mainstream,” wrote Doug Berman, a leading expert on sentencing law and policy at The Ohio State University School of Law.

“Federal judges nationwide typically sentence below the [child porn] guideline in roughly 2 out of 3 cases,” Berman noted on his blog, and “when deciding to go below the [child porn] guideline, typically impose sentences around 54 months below the calculated guideline minimum.”

Professor Berman continued to note that below-range sentences are frequently requested by prosecutors, including some on the cases before Judge Jackson, and that many judges determine that the guidelines are “unduly harsh,” especially when it comes to “first-time offenders.”

And that is the problem!

Let me be clear here: child pornography offenders, whether first-time or otherwise, are sick bastards who need to be locked up for as long as the law allows. Forget the purely advisory sentencing guidelines, just throw them in jail, and hide the key for as long as it can be hidden. Under 18 USC §2252A, a person who is convicted of knowingly possessing child pornography can be sentenced up to 10 years in prison or up to 20 years in prison if the minor depicted in the image is under the age of twelve. A person who is convicted of distributing or receiving child pornography faces a 5 to 20 year prison sentence, and prior convictions can lead to longer sentences.

Ten years, twenty years, is not too harsh a sentence for these offenses; such sentences are, in fact, too lenient. Judges should have multiple count conviction sentences run consecutively, not concurrently.

Of course, read the wording here: when prosecutors recommend specific sentences, it almost always means that this is part of a plea bargain arrangement. In child pornography cases, either the defendant was caught to the child porn, or he wasn’t. Witnesses aren’t required, save for procedural and chain-of-custody, simply the evidence. If the evidence is solid, have the defendant either plead to the maximum, or go to trial. We have previously noted how, locally, Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn has allowed lenient plea bargain arrangements even in murder cases, and while that’s too small a sample, the truth is that it happens everywhere in this country.

Prosecutors love plea bargains! Guaranteed convictions make them look good, and reduce the amount of work they have to do, but we need to hold prosecutors, judges, and probation and parole officials accountable, accountable for the proper punishment of criminals and for the safety of the public.

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A Philadelphia crook is laying on a slab in the morgue Updated! Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

As we noted yesterday, Philadelphians have been applying for concealed carry permits in droves, due to the city being unable to protect them from the bad guys. Now, another Philadelphian has protected his property:

    West Philadelphia resident fatally shoots trespasser who tried breaking into car

    A West Philadelphia resident on Wednesday night shot and killed a trespasser who had thrown a brick through the resident’s car

    by Rodrigo Torrejón | St Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2022 | 7:49 AM EDT

    A West Philadelphia resident on Wednesday night shot and killed a trespasser who had thrown a brick through the resident’s car, according to reports.

    Shortly after 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, police responded to a call of gunshots on the 4400 block of Fairmount Avenue, 6ABC reported. When officers arrived, they found a 23-year-old man lying on the 700 block of 44th Street, with multiple gunshot wounds.

    The man, whose name was not released, was taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead soon after.

    Police said that the 23-year-old had scaled a fence and trespassed onto the Fairmount Avenue property, into an enclosed rear yard and threw a brick into the driver side window of a Alfa Romeo SUV, 6ABC reported. After hearing the noise, the 49-year-old homeowner, whose name was also not released, came out to confront the man and shot at least three times.

The legal punishment for vandalism is not death; the legal punishment for stealing a car is not death. But sometimes the legal punishment for stupidity is death! When you break into someone’s property — and climbing a fence into someone’s “enclosed rear yard” definitely constitutes breaking into someone’s property — bad things can happen to you. As Robert Stacy McCain would put it, ‘play stupid games, win stupid prizes.’

From 6ABC News:

    Before receiving word of gunshots, (Chief Inspector Scott) Small said police got several calls about a man wearing a mask trespassing on the rear or properties in the area and one call about a man breaking into a vehicle.

    “We believe these calls are related to the shooting,” Small said.

And the money line:

    The 23-year-old is known by police and his last known address is two blocks from where he was shot, Small said.

“Is known by police,” huh? That’s the euphemism for “he was a frequent crook we’ve arrested several times.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Crazy people are dangerous.

This leads to the obvious question: why wasn’t the 23-year-old frequent flyer already behind bars? Did the police not have enough evidence to get him convicted of something in their previous encounters with him? Did the cops let the guy go with just a warning a couple of times? Did Larry Krasner, who has been Philadelphia’s District Attorney since the deceased was 19 years old, decline to prosecute, or offer the criminal lenient plea bargains which kept him from being locked up for a long sentence, or kept him out of jail completely? There’s some obvious speculation here, but one thing is certain: Philadelphia’s criminal justice system did this guy no favors! Had he been behind bars last night, he wouldn’t have been happy, but he’d at least have been able to look forward to getting out of jail sometime, and getting on with his life.

Instead, he’s lying on a slab in the morgue right now.

I’ve said it before: former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani showed us the way. When he was in charge, New York City strictly enforced the law against the entry-level crooks, giving them an early look at the inside of the penitentiary, giving them early incentive to straighten up and fly right before they got themselves into really serious trouble. It didn’t always work: some of them continued with a life of crime after every stint behind bars, but at least while they were locked up, they weren’t out on the streets preying on innocent civilians.

Well, this guy won’t be breaking into people’s back yards, won’t be smashing car windows, and won’t be stealing laptops or whatever else was left in those cars. Instead, he’ll be pushing up daisies somewhere. This is what “social justice” and “racial justice” law enforcement gets us: criminals out on the streets, and some criminals in early graves.

Updated: Friday, March 18, 2022:

The Inquirer story has been updated to note that the deceased is named Nijer James-Murphy, and that the unnamed homeowner is a good guy:

    While the District Attorney’s Office will determine if the shooting is a justifiable homicide, preliminarily, it appears the homeowner acted in self-defense, (Philadelphia Homicide Capt. Jason) Smith said.

    “He has a valid permit, his gun is registered to him, he has no priors, he called the police, he turned the gun over, and he is cooperating. He’s done all the things that a good, outstanding citizen should do,” he said.

Well, that settles it: Mr Krasner, sponsored by George Soros, and thoroughly eaten up with ‘social justice’ and ‘racial justice’ and a hatred for the police, would seem likely to want to charge the homeowner with something. After all, the deceased is listed as a black male in the city’s shooting victims database. The question is: where would the District Attorney find twelve honest citizens, twelve people in the city without criminal records, to serve on a jury which would convict a man defending his property in his enclosed backyard from a thug like Mr James-Murphy?

Let’s face it: the city ought to throw the homeowner a parade!

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Shockingly enough, Philly is seeing a huge surge in license-to-carry applications That's kind of what happens when law enforcement doesn't actually enforce the law

As of 11:59 PM EDT on the Ides of March, Philadelphia had seen 103 homicides, one more than on the same day in murder record-shattering 2021. That’s actually an improvement; the city was nine murders ahead of last year as recently as March 7th. All of which makes this article from Philadelphia magazine a surprise to absolutely no one:

License-to-Carry Applications Have Skyrocketed In Philly — Even More Than You’d Think

“When I saw how high the numbers were, I had to call our stats department to make sure they were right,” a Philadelphia Police Department representative told us.

by Victor Fiorillo | Wednesday, March 16, 2022 | 8:00 AM EDT

It didn’t surprise me a bit to learn that license-to-carry applications in Philadelphia have risen over the past year. First, you have the constant reports of shootings, carjackings and other violent crimes in the city. Second, the Philadelphia Police Department made it dramatically easier to apply for a license to carry, starting in January 2021. But I wasn’t exactly ready for just how big this increase has been. And neither was the Philadelphia Police Department, it seems.

“When I saw how high the numbers were, I had to call our stats department to make sure they were right,” police department spokesperson Jasmine Reilly told me after I requested the data.

From 2017 through 2020, the number of license-to-carry applications in Philadelphia held about steady, ranging between 11,049 and 11,814 applications each year. But in 2021, 70,789 people applied for licenses to carry guns.

In other words, license-to-carry applications more than sextupled last year. And in January of this year, the number of applications continued its upward trajectory. (The Pennsylvania State Police publish an annual report showing the number of licenses issued in the counties surrounding Philadelphia as well as in the rest of the state, but a spokesperson for PSP says that data isn’t yet available for 2021.)

There’s a lot more at the original.

The rate of increase of applications for concealed carry permits might have surprised some, but that they have increased dramatically can’t stun anyone. Since Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat — and the last Republican Mayor of Philadelphia left office when Harry Truman was still President — took office in January of 2016, killings in the city have risen from 277 to 315 to 353 to 356 to 499 to last years 562; the number of annual homicides has more than doubled since Mr Kenney took office. The George Soros-sponsored District Attorney Larry Krasner, also a Democrat, took office in 2018, and the homicide rate jumped 59.21% in his four years.

In March alone, while ‘only’ 19 people have been murdered, 73 people have been shot in the city; the gang-bangers are really kind of lousy shots. But while the wounded but not killed can take some solace that they are still alive, that’s only so much comfort.

The cited article goes through some of the steps required to obtain a concealed carry permit, and then we get to this:

Of course, just because you’re denied doesn’t mean you’re not carrying, and carrying without a license is generally a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to five years in prison. But that charge can be upgraded to a felony depending on the circumstances.

“I have a pistol on me at all times,” one local resident who says he was denied a carry license told me. “You’ve got to be crazy not to, the way things are going.”

The leadership of the city continually complain that the state legislature isn’t doing enough in the way of passing gun control legislation, or allowing the city to pass its own, stricter ordinances, but that really doesn’t matter: District Attorney Krasner doesn’t really enforce the gun control legislation that is on the books:

The urgency of Philadelphia’s crisis of fatal and non-fatal shootings will not be met by looking away from shootings. As noted above, City Council has led a valuable “100 Shooter Review,” a title that makes clear what we already know: that shootings are the primary issue. Our efforts must be focused on preventing shootings and holding people who commit shootings accountable, and we should not accept arrests for gun possession as a substitute.[1]100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 30 of the document, page 32 of the .pdf file.

This is very much in line with Mr Krasner’s statement:

This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society. We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.

Really? Perhaps, just perhaps, if law enforcement, from the police through the prosecutor, would treat the crimes that “matter less” than homicide seriously, people like the cretin who gunned down Hyram Hill would have been behind bars Monday morning, not out robbing someone, and not putting nine bullets into an apparently innocent victim.

It was then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-New York) who showed everyone the way. Under his Administration, and (mostly under that of his successor, Michael Bloomberg, New York went after the small-time criminals, using the theory that if you prosecuted and punished the ‘entry-level’ bad guys, maybe they’d get scared enough seeing the inside of the penitentiary early that they’d straighten out. Murder, after all, isn’t normally an entry-level crime. Even if it doesn’t set them on a better path, criminals in jail aren’t out on the streets, committing other crimes.

Since Mr Krasner, the social justice and racial justice warrior that he is, does not like putting away criminals, is it any wonder that the citizens of Philadelphia think that they are on their own, that they have to protect themselves, because the city will not?

Pennsylvania law says you can be denied a license to carry if you’re judged to be an “individual whose character and reputation is such that the individual would be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety.” There’s a lot of subjectivity in there, and an appeals process does exist for those who are denied.

The gun-carrying resident I spoke with didn’t bother appealing. He has a history of minor drug violations, a DUI, and various summary and misdemeanor offenses and says he’s more concerned about his personal safety than whether the police say he’s allowed to carry a gun.

“It’s not like they are going to protect me,” he argues.

Of course, the gang-bangers out there shooting people don’t bother with getting concealed carry permits. It’s shocking, I know, but it seems that criminals don’t obey the law!

There’s a lot more at the original, and unlike the Philadelphia Inquirer articles I frequently cite, this one isn’t behind a paywall; it’s worth a read.

References

References
↑1 100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 30 of the document, page 32 of the .pdf file.