Tag Archives: #Law

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They’re dead; what more could be done to them?

There’s some silliness in Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s concluding statement about the San Diego mosque killings:

(Cain) Clark and (Caleb) Vazquez’s hideous rampage almost certainly would have been treated as a murder, charges if they had lived. But in the hands of the Trump DOJ they may well not have been slapped with federal hate crime charges. This glaring laxity is just enough space for the Cains and Vazquez’s of America to run loose.

Uhhh, the killers are stone-cold graveyard dead; there’s not a lot more we could do to them at this point.

Why the San Diego Mosque’s Shooters Continue to Run Loose

Many police departments see hate crime data as a politically loaded minefield, leaving the FBI blind to the true scale of civil rights violence.

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson | Wednesday, May 20, 2026

At a news conference within hours after the shooting rampage at the San Diego Mosque, the San Diego Police Chief said the obvious: “The shooting would be investigated as a hate crime until it’s not.” His add-on, “it’s not,” gave with one hand and took back with the other on the issue of whether the rampage was a hate crime.

The FBI was only marginally less equivocal about whether the shooting was a hate crime. A top official promised to leave no stone unturned and said, “There was definitely hate rhetoric that was involved.” But he also gave with one hand and took back with the other. He quickly added that he did not see the murderous attack as “a specific threat to the mosque.”

The police are usually circumspect in issuing statements like this; is it any surprise that they were so this time?

The irony is that the alleged shooters, Clark Cain and Caleb Vazquez, left little doubt as to why they shot up the mosque. In what’s usual in these kinds of mass killings, the shooters leave a disjointed journal filled with scribblings that spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims. The pair did the same. If ever there was a smoking gun on a hate motive for the killing, they provided it with their diatribes against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims.

But why should that surprise? Surveys have repeatedly shown that hate crimes, violence, harassment, and threats against Muslims have been almost the norm in many circles. Dozens of neo-Nazis, anti-government, white supremacist groups, and tens of thousands of individuals spew hate with aplomb. The site’s writers lambaste blacks, Jews, gays, and are unabashed in praise of Hitler. They perennially exhort their readers and followers to arm themselves to the teeth against the imagined assault by the federal government on white people’s rights. It was virtually a given that the murders would fire the horde of racists up and ignite a frenzy of debate, speculation, denial, and even veiled acquiescence to the murders.

In reading those two paragraphs, I see no evidence or even allegations of a crime prior to the killings. Their speech was certainly offensive, but offensive speech is part of our freedom of speech. If people’s “scribblings . . . spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims,” are there not other people spewing hatred of whites and Christians and really normal people in general? Does Mr Hutchinson want the Geheime Staatspolizei to search every computer posting, or perhaps search people’s homes for written journals looking for hate speech? We have reported many times on the FBI under the Biden Administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics” looking for “domestic violent extremists”, before the program was made public and embarrassment made the FBI shut it down, and even then FBI Director Christopher Wray lied through his scummy teeth about the extent of it.

However, even when the Cains and Vazquezes are known, tracked, monitored, and surveilled, and worse commit hate acts, they often evade full punishment. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, but rather muddled, confused, and outright lax enforcement and prosecution of hate acts. Even when the FBI and local law enforcement agencies ID them for their propensity for violence, their hands are still tied.

The author keeps mistakenly referring to Cain Clark as Clark Cain.

It’s still early in the investigations, but if Messrs Clark and Vasquez committed any previous crimes, I haven’t yet seen such reported, and I have searched. If either committed offenses as juveniles, those records would have been sealed. News flash: neither the local police nor the FBI can do anything about people who have not yet committed actual crimes.

Another point: while Mr Vasquez was 18, Mr Clark was a minor at 17. Had they survived and been tried for murder, Mr Clark could be sentenced to nothing more than life without the possibility of parole. Mr Vasquez could be sentenced to death, but the Pyrite State has not actually executed anyone for the last twenty years. A ‘hate crime’ rider could do nothing more to them.

ABC Channel 7 reported:

A Sonnenrad patch, depicting a neo-Nazi symbol, and what analysts assess is likely a patch for a militant accelerationist group, are both visible on the plate carrier being worn by the person believed to be Clark, according to sources. Additionally, writings are visible on a gun, including drawings of SS bolts and neo-Nazi insignias, sources said.

According to our good friends on the left, Nazi symbols and signs are not at all disqualifying, at least not when it comes to a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, but just youthful mistakes.

But it shows you the depth of the problem about which Mr Hutchinson complained. The same Democrats who are willing to forgive Graham Platner’s ‘youthful mistake’ were also willing to surveil devout Catholics who simply preferred the Latin Mass. Mr Hutchinson would, like the FBI surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics,” criminalize thoughts. Like the movie Minority Report, they want to lock up potential criminals before they’ve committed any crime.

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A Philadelphia Inquirer sob story about a poor, poor, misunderstood murderer.

The First Street Journal has twice noted the case of Derek Lee, convicted of second degree murder for the killing of Leonard Butler in Pittsburgh. Under Title 18 §2502(b), second degree murder is defined to be “A criminal homicide constitutes murder of the second degree when it is committed while defendant was engaged as a principal or an accomplice in the perpetration of a felony.” The penalty for second degree murder in the Keystone State is specified as life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. That’s pretty simple: the murderer is already committing a crime, so even if he wasn’t necessarily planning on killing someone, he was already on the scene, already planning on committing a crime, and prepared to kill if he thought it necessary, even if you were not the person who pulled the trigger.

Whether you’re the guy who fires the fatal shot or not, you’re still a really bad guy, and there’s no good reason for you to ever be put back out on the streets with decent people again.

Derek Lee and a gentleman named Paul Durham broke into Mr Butler’s home. I’ll let The Philadelphia Inquirer give you the details:

In 2014, Lee and Paul Durham pushed their way into a Pittsburgh home armed with a handgun and Taser. Police said they went at the request of the spurned ex-lover of the man living there, Leonard Butler, 44.

Inside, Lee and Durham forced Butler and his girlfriend into the basement. They ordered them to their knees. Lee struck Butler with the gun and used the Taser on him before going upstairs with Butler’s watch.

So, Mr Lee was not only committing a crime, but a violent crime, as he pistol-whipped Mr Butler. This wasn’t just a burglary where the homeowner surprised the criminals, but one in which the criminals were actively attacking the victim.

In the basement, Butler lunged for Durham’s weapon, and in the struggle, Butler was shot and killed.

Both criminals were packing heat that day.

Well, the newspaper is never content at just giving us the facts, but wants to weave a sob story about poor, poor Mr Lee:

Lee grew up in Pittsburgh, a small, wiry boy, the youngest of three children in a close-knit family. He played baseball and basketball, and worked as a youth camp counselor at his grandmother’s church.

His father later moved to Ashtabula, Ohio, splitting the family across state lines. Lee went back and forth between them.

In his teens, Lee’s life shifted. He drifted into street life and graduated high school “by my teeth,” he said.

At that point, at least in the online version of the story, the Inquirer gives us a photo of a smiling Mr Lee, in his graduation gown and holding his diploma.

Have your heartstrings not yet been pulled? Are you not feeling sorry for Mr Lee yet? But the newspaper continues:

When Lee was 18, he and another man shot at a group of basketball players outside a college party. Although five players were injured, none of the bullets from Lee’s gun struck anyone. Lee was convicted of attempted criminal homicide and sentenced to seven to 14 years in prison.

When he was released, Lee’s family welcomed him home with a celebration and his mother’s seven-cheese macaroni. He was 25. He found work as a dishwasher, but struggled to stabilize his life, Lee said.

So, young Mr Lee and his buddies, for whatever their reasons, were armed, and shot into a group of young men outside a party, firing indiscriminately, trying at the very least to shoot some people, and probably hoping to kill some of them. And thus, that good young man, who “worked as a youth camp counselor at his grandmother’s church,” and suffered as the son in a broken home found himself exactly where he belonged: behind bars.

Well, I’m from a broken home, too, but somehow, some way, I never tried to kill anybody due to that.

Mr Lee was then a convicted felon. And that means premeditation when Mr Durham and he broke into Mr Butler’s home, because just by carrying a firearm, Mr Lee was committing a second degree felony under Title 18 §6105.

Then came the burglary and the murder. Mr Lee was a previously convicted felon, in the process of committing more felonies. Apparently his first stint in prison did not teach him the lesson it should have, as the second group of crimes occurred less than a year after he was released from his previous time behind bars.

Why, I have to ask, would any decent people want someone like Mr Lee back out on the streets?

The Inquirer continued with their sob story:

In prison again, Lee said he reached a breaking point. “I just hit that rock-bottom place where I knew I had to do something,” he said.

He turned to religion. He entered a chaplain’s program, and trained service dogs. He also appealed his case himself, and began mentoring incarcerated men serving long or life sentences.

“Society throws away people like us,” Lee said. “It … judges them by one of the worst moments in their life. But I truly believe that people can be redeemed.”

No, Mr Lee, “society” didn’t throw you away: you did that! One of the “worst moments of (his) life”? Mr Leonard didn’t get any further moments in his life; he’s stone-cold graveyard dead because of what Messrs Durham and Lee did.

Naturally, Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, wants to see the murderers previously sentenced under the second degree murder stature given a break:

(Mr Krasner) was joined by several criminal justice advocates, including Saleem Holbrook, executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center, and John Pace, associate director of reentry and engagement at the Youth Sentencing and Re-entry Project. Both men had once been sentenced to life in prison and were later released after U.S. Supreme Court rulings barred mandatory life sentences for juveniles and made those decisions retroactive.

Holbrook stressed that the hundreds of men and women incarcerated under the former law were waiting for an opportunity to be released and show they could contribute meaningfully to their communities.

“(S)how they could contribute meaningfully to their communities”? Yeah, uh huh, right. I have a bridge you can buy, too.

So, what’s the outcome? Mr Lee will have to be resentenced, and his new sentence could still be life, even life without the possibility of parole. But the decision in his case could mean that others in the Keystone State sentenced automatically to life without parole could have their cases reopened for more lenient terms. Some could even be sentenced to time already served, letting actual killers back out on the streets.

The Abolitionist Law Center does not believe anyone should be incarcerated at all, and would if they could opposes all prison sentences, and would, if they could, free every murderer, every rapist, every drug dealer, and every assailant locked up in Pennsylvania’s prisons.

But there’s one person in Mr Lee’s case who cannot be resentenced, and that’s Mr Butler: he was sentenced to death, executed on the spot, and there is no appeal from that.

Despite the efforts of the newspaper to paint Mr Lee as a basically good kid who just made a couple of forgivable mistakes, I remain unmoved. He has already proven himself to be a cancer on civilized life, and should never be allowed to menace decent people again.

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Lawfare! What goes around comes around

Our good friends on the left have been complaining for a while now that the federal Department of Justice has been ‘weaponized’ to go after President Trump’s opponents, but perhaps they ought to consider just who started this s(tuff). We have noted, dozens of times, how the Department of Justice, under now-thankfully-retired President Joe Biden, and the Republican-hating Attorney General Merrick Garland, relentlessly pursued the Capitol kerfufflers. We pointed out the scandal of the FBI surveilling what they called “radical traditionalist Catholics” as an “extremist threat“, and that then-FBI Director Christopher Wray lied through his scummy teeth about the extent of the surveillance. My good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter William Teach has a story this morning on how the far-left persecutor prosecutor in Hennepin County, Minnesota, who grants lenient plea bargains and dismissed charges to real criminals in Minneapolis, wants to put federal law enforcement officers on trial for enforcing immigration laws.

Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, who previously made a fool of himself with his spittle-flecked declaration that he would seek to find state charges against the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers who were pardoned by President Trump, despite the fact that the vast majority had already served their sentences, wants to do the same thing.

And now we have this, from the very much pro-prenatal infanticide Philadelphia Inquirer:

Biden’s Justice Department was overly aggressive in prosecuting a Bucks County antiabortion activist, Trump administration says

In a nearly-900 page report, officials said the prosecution of Bucks County resident Mark Houck — which ended with an acquittal — was an example of how the Biden administration “weaponized” the law.

by Chris Palmer | Tuesday, April 14, 2026 | 3:15 PM EDT

The Justice Department on Tuesday said federal prosecutors under former President Joe Biden “weaponized” the law to target people with antiabortion views, and said one of the key examples was a case in which the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia charged a Bucks County activist with seeking to intimidate workers and patients outside a Planned Parenthood clinic. That case ended in an acquittal.

Note the important part: Mark Houck was acquitted by a jury of his peers! The trial lasted five days, and the jury returned the verdict in just an hour; Mr Houck faced up to eleven years in prison.

Unlike the vast majority of the Capitol kerfufflers, almost all of whom were normal, working-class people, Mr Houck had solid legal help, as the Chicago-based Catholic public-interest law firm Thomas More Society sent attorneys to take up his case. St Thomas More was a previous ally of King Henry VIII who withdrew from public life when the King attacked the Catholic Church, all to secure a divorce, but was executed anyway for refusing to accept the King as head of the church in England.

In a nearly 900-page report released Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s administration said the Justice Department under Biden and then-Attorney General Merrick Garland was biased in how it sought to enforce the FACE Act, a federal law that makes it a crime to injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone at abortion clinics, pregnancy centers, or houses of worship.

The report said that the Justice Department in previous years “ignored and downplayed” complaints unless they came from abortion advocates, and that it collaborated with abortion advocacy groups, sought tougher sentences against people who opposed abortion, and “engaged in inappropriate conduct and comments” while prosecuting abortion opponents.

The report is the first to be issued by the Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group,” an initiative created by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to respond to Trump’s belief that past administrations had unfairly — if not illegally — manipulated the law to target political opponents.

Reporter Chris Palmer’s article noted that rather than allowing Mr Houck to turn himself in, the FBI sent sixteen armed agents to his home to arrest him, and noted several other points in the vindictiveness of the Biden Administration in pursuing him. Sanjay Patel, who aggressively pushed for the indictment, was recently fired by the Department of Justice, as were three other attorneys.

During his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump said that his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would be thrown in jail, and his supporters kept chanting “Lock her up!” throughout his term, but the Justice Department never filed charges against her. It was the Biden Administration which began the policy of pursuing legal action against Mr Trump and his supporters.

This far, there have been few actual criminal cases filed against Biden Administration officials, but many have lost their jobs. Former Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was tried and convicted for obstruction of justice for trying to help illegal immigrant Eduardo Flores-Ruiz evade arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, agents as he was about to leave the courthouse; Mr Flores-Ruiz was successfully arrested following a foot chase, pleaded guilty to illegal re-entry following a previous deportation, and has been deported.

Judge Dugan is scheduled to be sentenced on June 3rd, and while she faces up to five years in the big house, it is considered unlikely that, as a first offender, she will actually receive time behind bars.

Thoroughly biased Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg was recently bitch-slapped by a three-judge appeals court panel for trying to prevent illegals from being deported, but he has faced no criminal charges.

Now Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard Williams has sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice over a conspiracy which resulted in the failed first impeachment of President Trump.

There are still 2¾ years remaining in the Trump Administration, and there remains plenty of time for the Democrats and obstructionists to find themselves criminally charged. Remember: they started this s(tuff), and what goes around, comes around!

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Pennsylvania just became a little less safe

Well, of course.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat of course, opposes capital punishment, as do I, but the Governor of the Keystone State does not have arbitrary power to issue pardons or sentence commutations on his own. The most Mr Shapiro could do, as his predecessor Tom Wolf did before him, was to decline to sign any death warrants. But now, the Governor is happy that the state Supreme Court held that mandatory sentences of life without the possibility of parole for second-degree murder violate the state constitution.

We have previously noted this case.

Under Title 18§2502(b), murder of the second degree is a criminal homicide which is committed while defendant was engaged as a principal or accomplice in the perpetration of a felony. That’s pretty simple: the murderer is already committing a crime, so even if he wasn’t necessarily planning on killing someone, he was already on the scene, already planning on committing a crime, and prepared to kill if he thought it necessary.

Whether you’re the guy who fires the fatal shot or not, you’re still a really bad guy, and there’s no good reason for you to ever be put back out on the streets with decent people again.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story on the case can be found here. The opinion of the court can be found here. From the newspaper:

One of the lead lawyers in the case, Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center, said the decision “will have profound ramifications” for the state’s criminal justice system, and that it “represents the culmination of decades of movement-building by incarcerated people and their families and communities.”

Ben Grote, huh? How unserious is Mr Grote? He couldn’t even be bothered to clean up his beta male beard before going before the state Supreme Court. But, alas! he won his case.

Image from main page of Abolitionist Law Center website, screencaptured on October 9, 2024.

Mr Grote works for the Abolitionist Law Center, which we have previously mentioned. What is not mentioned is that the Abolitionist Law Center is opposed to incarceration for anything, opposes all prison sentences, and would, if they could, free every murderer, every rapist, every drug dealer, and every assailant locked up in Pennsylvania’s prisons.

We challenge every point on the criminal punishment conveyor belt including policing, courts, jails and prisons, and various forms of legal supervision, as well as other aspects of the carceral machine.

Boldface in the original.

I might have ignored this story, especially since I was eating the very delicious lamb chops my wife made for supper, were it not for a very lovely lady on Twitter. Miss Long has in her Twitter bio a background illustration saying:

Roses are red,
No lives are blue,
Defund the Police,
Abolish ICE too.

Miss Long posted a series on Twitter, beginning here, praising the Abolitionist Law Center for its work. We already know that the Abolitionist Law Center wants to abolish prisons completely, to give dangerous predators some cockamamie “restorative justice” bovine feces.

Some people are beyond redemption, some people are simply evil and can never be trusted in society. Miss Long and the Abolitionist Law Center would see the gates of prisons thrown open and deranged killers like Wesley Cook let back out on the streets. They don’t even like, as noted above, “legal supervision,” which means probation and probation officers. Miss Long wants to see criminal illegal immigrants, some guilty of murder and rape, left free to terrorize innocent people.

I assume that Miss Long and the others believe that people are just innately good, and if the people we now see as bad guys are just left alone and shown sweetness and light, they’ll all be great people and credits to their communities.

Well, that’s just plain bovine feces. Some people simply need to be removed from society, for society to remain safe and secure for the people who are actually good citizens. I can’t even understand how some people can think differently.