Editors at the Washington Examiner consider the fates of progressive prosecutors and their most vocal supporter.
With his defendant-friendly prosecutors facing pushback and even recall elections, left-wing financier George Soros recently felt the need to defend his criminal justice agenda, claiming, “Like most of us, I’m concerned about crime.”
If that’s true, he has a very funny way of showing it.
Soros’s essay was supposed to defend and justify his backing of prosecutors who are extraordinary for being soft on crime. But time and again, such prosecutors have shown that their philosophy is inconsistent with justice. Again and again, they release violent career criminals who victimize ordinary citizens going about their business.
Soros donated to one prosecutor in Fairfax County, Virginia, who needlessly released a man who went on a spree shooting homeless people up and down the East Coast. The alleged perpetrator, Gerald Brevard, had been apprehended for abduction and attempted rape, but Soros-backed prosecutor Steve Descano let him plead down to lesser charges and even dropped several slam-dunk charges that police later brought against him for a separate incident. As a direct result of Descano’s decisions, Brevard was free and out on the street when the homeless shootings occurred. Blood is on his hands and on those of his donor.
Similarly, Soros-backed state’s attorney Kim Foxx of Cook County, Illinois, deliberately avoided charging an alleged drug dealer with gun possession last month, even after he was caught with $8,000 worth of marijuana and an illegal gun. Torrence Reese had beaten a drug dealing-related murder rap as recently as 2017. In the eyes of the law, he is, of course, innocent of that charge. But Foxx’s office, which prosecuted him in that case ostensibly believing him to be quite guilty, chose voluntarily, without any prompting from a judge or any negotiation with a defense team, to pretend the gun just wasn’t there.