Upon seeing this tweet from Eyal Yakoby, I had to check the article to see if it was as bad as I suspected. In some ways, it really wasn’t, because most of it was based on the legal problems for José Ibarra’s defense, and the decision to seek a bench trial, a trial by a judge rather than a jury.

Laken Riley’s killer never stood a chance

For all the political controversy surrounding Jose Ibarra, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.

By Danny Cevallos, MSNBC legal analyst | Thursday, November 21, 2024 | 7:07 PM EST

Jose Antonio Ibarra was convicted on multiple counts of murder Wednesday in the February killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. Ibarra was immediately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, along with other consecutive sentences for lesser crimes, including aggravated assault with intent to rape and “peeping Tom.”

Riley’s murder became a political rallying cry at this summer’s Republican National Convention because Ibarra entered the country illegally in 2022. But for all the political controversy, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.

MSNBC’s legal analyst then goes through the reasons why the defense opted for a bench trial, noting that the defense normally prefers juries, because they only have to persuade one juror out of twelve that there’s reasonable doubt, or confuse one juror out of twelve. Then there was this:

Defense attorneys might alternatively push for a bench trial because the evidence against a defendant is both overwhelming and horrific. That’s likely what happened here. The defense had no chance with a jury.

Plus one more:

Sometimes defense counsel just gets handed a truly awful, unwinnable case.

Those two statements are the closest Danny Cevallos, himself a criminal defense attorney, came to saying that Mr Ibarra was found guilty because he actually is guilty, because he actually assaulted and killed Miss Riley.

Look at the article headline, which might have been written by an editor rather than Mr Cevallos. The original working title, as submitted was “The murderer of nursing student Laken Riley was found guilty. Here’s why,” which is visible if you hold your cursor over the article tab if you open it in Microsoft Edge. But whoever wrote the final title was certainly using it as clickbait, because anyone seeing it would think that the author thought that Mr Ibarra was railroaded.

This brought to mind a ‘conversation’ I had with my good friend Kirby McCain, the brother of Robert Stacy McCain of The Other McCain. On a completely unrelated topic, that of the lack of those supposed 81 million Biden voters showing up for Kamala Harris Emhoff, Mr McCain wrote:

Maybe the death of George Floyd in May 2020 was used by Democrats and their lackies in the media to mobilize black voters. And there was no such event in 2024. Just a thought.

To which I responded:

There was such an event in 2024, but it was the murder of Laken Riley, an innocent white woman, by a ‘brown’ illegal immigrant, not a white policeman restraining a black, methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled previously convicted felon.

This is part of the reason that the left hate Twitter: without unrestrained social media, the killing of Miss Riley by a Venezuelan gang member just released into our society by the Biden ICE would have been just a local story; then credentialed media would have ignored it to death.

Mr Cevallos wrote that Miss “Riley’s murder became a political rallying cry at this summer’s Republican National Convention because Ibarra entered the country illegally in 2022,” which is objectively true, but it is also objectively true that the Democrats were doing everything they could to minimize the stories of crime by illegal immigrants before the election, and the credentialed media journolists were going right along with it. The only reason that Miss Riley’s murder became national news, and contributed to former and future President Trump’s victory is because of Elon Musk buying Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — and restoring free speech values to it.

The truth will set you free is the long-time rallying cry, but, for our credentialed media, the only truth about which they are concerned is which truths they wish you to know. That’s why they hate Twitter, because on free speech sites truths our former gatekeepers of information didn’t want you to know gets exposed anyway.

That is not to say you should believe everything you read on Twitter; there’s plenty of untrue things there, and you have to look at things you really, really want to believe with a jaundiced eye, and do some research in other places, because there are people who will flat out lie to you. Be wary! But just because something isn’t in The New York Times doesn’t mean it isn’t true.