Prosecutor who sought to end cash bail imprisonment is bemoaning lower bail for violent offenders

Every once in a while, I’ll come across a story that has me both laughing my butt off and shaking my head in disbelief. As we’ve noted before, Larry Krasner won the election to become District Attorney in Philadelphia in 2017, and was the beneficiary of a huge campaign contribution from leftist billionaire George Soros, is a leftist who hates the police and doesn’t pursue supposedly petty offenses, and ran on a platform saying he would:

  • Stop prosecuting insufficient and insignificant cases
  • Review past convictions, free the wrongfully convicted
  • Stop cash bail imprisonment
  • Treat addiction as an illness, not a crime
  • Protect immigrants while protecting everybody
  • Reject a return to the failed drug wars of the past
  • Stand up to police misconduct

The cost of Mr Krasner’s victory has been written in blood. Philadelphia has seen more murders, many more murders than New York City, which has more than five times Philly’s population.

Philadelphia’s daily average inmate population was 6,409 when Mr Krasner took office, and was down to 4,849 on August 31, 2019.

One of the people who wasn’t in jail on Friday, March 13, 2020, was Hasan Elliot, 21. How did the District Attorney’s office treat Mr Elliot, a known gang-banger?

  • Mr Elliott, then 18 years old, was arrested in June 2017 on gun- and drug-possession charges stemming after threatening a neighbor with a firearm. The District Attorney’s office granted him a plea bargain arrangement on January 24, 2018, and he was sentenced to 9 to 23 months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. However, he was paroled earlier than that, after seven months in jail.
  • Mr Elliot soon violated parole by failing drug tests and failing to mate his meetings with his parole officer.
  • Mr Elliott was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine on January 29, 2019. This was another parole violation, but Mr Krasner’s office did not attempt to have Mr Elliot returned to jail to finish his sentence, nor make any attempts to get serious bail on the new charges;he was released on his own recognizance.
  • After Mr Elliot failed to appear for his scheduled drug-possession trial on March 27, 2019, and prosecutors dropped those charges against him.

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering the hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family.

On that Friday the 13th, Police Corporal James O’Connor IV, 46, was part of a Philadelphia police SWAT team trying to serve a predawn arrest warrant on Mr Elliott, from a March 2019 killing. Mr Elliot greeted the SWAT team with a hail of bullets, and Corporal O’Connor was killed. Had Mr Elliot been in jail, as he could have been due to parole violations, had Mr Krasner’s office treated him seriously, Corporal O’Connor would have gone home safely to his wife that day. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 president John McNesby also has criticized Krasner, saying his policies led to the killing of O’Connor. “Unfortunately, he’s murdered by somebody that should have never been on the street,” McNesby said.

McNesby also said FOP members and police officers formed a human barricade to block Krasner from entering the hospital Friday to see O’Connor’s family.

The numbers don’t lie. Under Mayor Jim Kenney, who has managed to make past Mayors John Street and Michael Nutter look great, District Attorney Krasner and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw (who, to be honest, is really just Mayor Kenney’s puppet), Philadelphia has become measurably much worse. Mr Kenney has been in office since the beginning of 2016, and Mr Krasner since the start of 2018, and Philly is now much more dangerous. Their policies were put into governing practice, and, unless chaos and death was the goal all along, they failed miserably.

And now — and it’s difficult not to laugh about this — the esteemed Mr Krasner is lamenting that judges are not imposing high enough bail!

Amid rising gun crime in Philly, DA Larry Krasner blasts low bail

by Mensah M. Dean and Chris Palmer | January 11, 2021 | 7:21 PM EST

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner on Monday blasted bail commissioners for setting lower bails than his office routinely seeks for those charged with gun crimes at a time when the city is besieged by near-record gun violence.

While his office often has asked for million-dollar bails for those charged with violent gun crimes — with suspects typically having to pay 10% of that amount — the median bail last week for those arrested for possession of a gun was just $110,000, and $150,000 for those arrested for a violent offense involving a gun, Krasner said during a news conference in West Philadelphia with community leaders and anticrime activists.

“I’m not saying that’s a tiny amount of money, but what I am saying is for people who have resources, including criminals who are deriving substantial profit from illegal activity, this is not a hard thing to pay,” he said. As a result, he said, many of those accused of gun crimes are back on the street while awaiting trial.

Within 60 days, his office will release a report that will explore the impact bail amounts are having on crime, Krasner said during the first of what he said would be weekly press conferences to keep the public apprised on his offices’ efforts to combat violence.

He campaigned on ending cash bail imprisonment, and now he’s shocked, shocked!, that bail commissioners are setting lower bail amounts. In asking “for million-dollar bails for those charged with violent gun crimes,” is he not seeking to keep those charged, but not yet convicted, suspects in jail, in “cash bail imprisonment”?

This is the type of thing that “social justice,” rather than real justice, law enforcement gets you. By not seriously pursuing the little crimes, when the bad guys get a bit older and are graduated to bigger and badder things, they have less of past criminal record, which naturally means lower bail amounts. More, it means that some of those “charged with violent gun crimes” could have been locked up in jail, on the lesser offenses, on the days that they committed worse crimes. As documented above, Hasan Elliot was one of those criminals who could have been in prison, not just on his original sentence, but on parole violations, had Mr Krasner treated him seriously. Police Corporal James O’Connor IV is stone-cold graveyard dead because Mr Krasner and his office didn’t treat him seriously.

From the Inquirer:

(Mr Krasner’s spokeswoman Jane) Roh responded (to Mt Nesby’s statements) on Friday saying it was “frankly ghoulish that anyone, much less an authority figure, would choose to spread lies for personal or political gain in response to this tragedy.”

On Monday, McNesby shot back, contending that police again “are under attack from the district attorney’s rogue staff.” Calling Roh a “Krasner henchman,” McNesby wrote in a statement that Roh was using “O’Connor’s murder as a reason to attack ALL Police as ‘ghoulish,’” and contended that the “vicious” attack was “tacitly approved and supported by Krasner.”

On Twitter Monday night, Roh said McNesby’s language in the aftermath of the shooting was filled with “Trumpian, deliberately inflammatory falsehoods.” She said he should be “working 24/7 to protect the health & safety of his members” during the coronavirus outbreak.

As opposed to protecting them from the bullets of street thugs Mr Krasner allowed out of jail? COVID-19 is serious, but bullets fired by criminals appear to be a deadlier danger. You can check out Miss Roh’s Twitter feed to see how much of a whacked-out leftist she is; it’s no wonder she is Mr Krasner’s spokesidiot.

Larry Krasner has brought this on himself, through his idiotic, social justice policies. Under his ‘leadership,’ Philadelphia jumped from 315 homicides before he took office, to 353, then 356, and then 2020’s whopping 499. Mr Krasner isn’t all of the reason behind those huge jumps, but he’s definitely part of it. He may be bemoaning the lower bail, but it’s the result of his policies. Thing is, he’s not paying the price for his failures, the good citizens of Philadelphia are.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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