woodguru wrote:
I didn't really see how she could even be entertained as a legitimate judge for this case giving the way she monkeyed up her first crack at it.
Meet Alvin Bragg, Rogue Prosecutor Whose Policies Are Wreaking Havoc in Manhattan1 Alvin Bragg has taken his policies directly from the rogue prosecutor movementâs required playbook.
2 Their policies are pro-criminal and anti-victim.
3 Bragg should know better than most that the job of the district attorney is to enforce the laws as written and exercise appropriate prosecutorial discretion.We all know Batmanâs backstory: A young Bruce Wayne watches in horror as muggers murder his parents.
Lawlessness ran rampant in Gotham City because police and prosecutors couldnâtâor wouldnâtâhold criminals accountable.
Like their fictional counterparts, todayâs residents of the real-life Gotham, New York City, face a constant barrage of lawlessness. Stories of violent crime abound, with these heinous acts increasing exponentially.
Against this background, a new mayor, police commissioner, and district attorney have all taken office within the past several weeks. The mayor ran on tackling the crime problem, and he appointed a police commissioner who pledged to do the same.
Yet, Manhattanâs new district attorney has implemented new pro-criminal policies that undercut the mayorâs and police commissionerâs mandateâjust like all the other rogue prosecutors we have been warning about for almost two years.
Alvin Bragg has taken his policies directly from the rogue prosecutor movementâs required playbook.
Braggâs policies are so badâand dangerousâthat the new police commissionerâKeechant Sewellâfelt compelled to warn about their dire consequences.
Sewell knows, as we have been warning, that cities that have elected rogue prosecutors have seen a dramatic increase in violent crime and crime overall, and her city will look like those others if Bragg acts like the other rogues.
Braggâs policies are likely to lead to the same mayhem in Manhattan, at a time when the borough and the city can least afford it.
Another Pro-Criminal Soros PuppetFollowing in the footsteps of Los Angelesâ rogue prosecutor, George Gascon, Bragg sent a memo shortly after taking office to his entire staff detailing his âkey principlesâ and policies. They took effect that same day.
To be clear, those policies are not the result of serious study or debate within the district attorneyâs office or with his senior advisersâthough Bragg would like you to think that his policies are pure common sense.
Instead, they are simply copycat policies other George Soros-supported or inspired prosecutors have enacted. Just look at the policies Gascon implemented in Los Angeles, the ones Kim Foxx imposed in Chicago, and the ones Larry Krasner put in place in Philadelphia, just to name a few.
Those prosecutors are implementing a top-down agenda funded by Soros and other left-leaning billionairesâeither directly or indirectlyâby carrying out the diktats of richly funded (and ironically named) pro-criminal organizations such as Fair and Just Prosecution, which is neither fair nor just, at least not to crime victims.
In an effort to create some distance between Soros and some of these rogue DAs, Soros or his affiliated entities contribute to political action committees, which then make âindependent expendituresâ on behalf of the candidate. Thatâs what happened with Bragg.
Soros representatives have made a point to say that none of the $1 million Soros pumped into the race was funneled to Bragg. The Color of Change PAC expended funds as an independent expenditure supporting Bragg.
Oh. Thanks for the clarification.
The Color of Change PAC financially supported several prosecutors, each of whom we have highlighted in our âRogue Prosecutorâ blog series: Kim Gardner (St. Louis), Foxx (Chicago), Gascon (Los Angeles), and Krasner (Philadelphia), all of whom were elected. The PAC also supported Genevieve Jones-Wright, a public defender who ran for San Diego district attorney, but (thankfully) lost.
It beggars belief that Soros and his billionaire friends did not know precisely how their donations would be used, and funneling those donations through a difficult-to-decipher web of companies and organizationsâpresumably created for the very purpose of providing plausible deniability if things go poorlyâcannot hide that fact.
Regardless, Braggâs key principlesâdriven, he writes, in large part by the experiences he had growing up in Harlem in the 1980sâare virtually identical with those of other Soros-backed district attorneys:
Investing more in diversion and alternatives to incarceration.
Reducing pretrial incarceration.
Focusing on accountability, not sentence length.
Limiting youth being prosecuted in adult court.
Actively supporting those reentering society (which sounds good, but in practice means, among other things, seeking little to no probation or post-conviction supervision for offenders).
Policies Nothing to âBraggâ AboutSuperficially, those principles might sound reasonable. But theyâre not. Bragg and his fellow rogue prosecutors mean something differentâand totally unfathomableâto the majority of individuals who hear those talking points.
For the record, many conservatives have supported appropriate rehabilitation and reentry programs, including strong support for the federal First Step Act, among other things.
But when Bragg talks about ideas like âdiversion and alternatives to incarceration,â in practice, he really means the elimination of accountability and prison altogether for most offenders.
His push to âreduce pretrial incarcerationâ is more like a shoveâshoving aside the possibility of pretrial incarceration for even dangerous defendants in many cases. Whatâs particularly astonishing is that Bragg is making this push in the face of New York stateâs already widely criticized and problematically lax bail policies.
When Bragg says he will âfocus on accountability, not sentence length,â he actually means that he will work to eliminate jail and prison sentences for most convicted criminals and in many cases will cajole victims to sit down with their perpetrator to talk about ârestorative justice.â
While that might be appropriate in a few very limited circumstances, itâs not for the vast majority of crimes and certainly not on the scale that Bragg proposes.
Just imagine a crime victim being told that: (1) the violent perpetrator who altered her life forever isnât going to jail or prison, even though he was convicted; and (2) that, under the officeâs ârestorative justiceâ model, she has to sit down with the criminal so they can âtalk it out.â
Unfortunately, thatâs one of the key features of rogue prosecutors: Their policies are pro-criminal and anti-victim.
Bragg, in a tone-deaf comment that defies logic, said that his policies are âgoing to make us safer.â
âItâs intuitive. Itâs common sense,â he said. âI donât understand the pushback.â
We do.
And others are catching on, too, as they have seen this nightmare play out in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, and everywhere else thereâs a rogue prosecutor.
Riddle us this, Batman: Why are Bragg and his fellow âprogressive prosecutorsâ so determined to pursue this problematic path even in the face of bad consequences?
Itâs because the rogue prosecutor movement is an outgrowth of the same radicals that created the Black Lives Matter movement, as detailed in our colleague Mike Gonzalezâs book âBLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.â
As we have detailed in our major research paper on the topic, the rogue prosecutor movement is not shy about its beliefs, which are twofold: (1) the entire criminal justice system is systemically racist, and (2) the criminal justice system must be âreverse-engineeredâ to eliminate the racist rot that supposedly infects the entire system.
Of course, the entire criminal justice system is not âsystemically racist.â As one columnist recently wrote, race relations in America are better than ever, even though many liberals wonât admit it.
Crimes You Can Now Commit in NYCLike Bostonâs former rogue prosecutor, Rachael Rollins, whom the Biden administration recently elevated to be the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, and Los Angelesâ Gascon, Bragg has announced crimes that his office wonât prosecute, even though they remain criminal offenses in the state of New York.
These are some of the many crimes you can now commit with impunity in Manhattan:
Possessing marijuana.
Refusing to pay the fare for public transportation.
Trespassing.
Failing to pay fines for unlicensed operation of motor vehicle.
Committing any traffic infraction.
Resisting arrest.
Obstructing governmental administration.
Engaging in prostitution.
Most other misdemeanor offenses.
In other words, Bragg unilaterally appointed himself a one-man legislative committee with the power to ignoreâand overrideâthe laws New Yorkâs Legislature passed, and New Yorkâs governor duly signed into law.
As experience has shown in other cities with similar âwonât prosecuteâ lists, as soon as the word gets out that the district attorney wonât prosecute certain crimes, you see an explosion in the rates of those crimes.
And when the district attorney wonât prosecute certain crimes, the police have no incentive to arrest people for committing those crimes. And when the arrests for those crimes go down in raw numbers, the rogue prosecutors brag, in circular reasoning, that the âdataâ proves that their approach worksâbecause the number of arrests for those crimes have gone down.
Watering Down Felonies to MisdemeanorsAs if the âwonât prosecuteâ list isnât disturbing enough, even more disturbing is Braggâs decision to require his deputies to water down (undercharge) serious criminal offenses from serious felonies to mere misdemeanors.
When you combine that with Braggâs new directive requiring a presumption of pretrial non-incarceration for every case (discussed below), except for those charged with homicide and a few other heinous crimes, there is no doubt that his intent is to favor criminals at the expense of New Yorkers he was elected to protect.
Under Braggâs scheme, the following crimes are to be watered down:
First-degree robbery must be charged as petty larceny. Thatâs required even in cases where force or threat of force is used and the criminal displays a dangerous weapon. As long as the criminal âdoes not create a genuine risk of physical harm,â the charge must be watered down to petty larceny. This means that the majority of robberies in commercial settings like stores and gas stations will be reduced to misdemeanors. And how will Bragg define âgenuine risk of physical harmâ? That terminology is not in the penal law. Or another possible scenario: Someone commits a robbery while brandishing a gun that, unbeknownst to the victim, is not loaded. Since the gun is not actually loaded, under Braggâs policy, there would be no âgenuine risk of physical harm,â even though the victim would be scared for her life. Robbery is a Class B violent felony, meaning that, if convicted, a felon would receive a minimum of five years in prison and a maximum of 25 years. Petty larceny is a Class A misdemeanor, with a maximum punishment of one year in jail, and is eligible for probation up to three years.
Residential burglary watered down. Theft of property from a home that is ânot accessible to the living areaâ or a storage area, must not be charged as a first-degree felony, but watered down and charged as a second- or third degree felony. Under this scheme, if a person breaks into an enclosed attic from the roof and steals property, and the attic is not accessible from a living area, he can only be charged with third-degree burglary.
Commercial burglary watered down. A criminal who commits second-degree burglary (knowingly entering a building with intent to commit a crime therein) shall only be charged with a third-degree burglary. Thatâs the difference between a possible sentence of three and a half years to 15 years under second-degree burglary to a sentence of probation of seven years. This effectively means that almost all commercial burglaries will only be charged as a third-degree burglary, even if someone lives in an apartment in the commercial establishment.
Drug dealers get off easy. A so-called low-level agent of a seller shall be charged with misdemeanor possession in the seventh degree, instead of possession with the intent to distribute illegal drugs, which is a Class D felony. Thatâs the difference between a possible sentence exposure of probation to one year for simple possession versus up to seven years for the felony.
This makes all suspected low-level drug dealers subject only to misdemeanor prosecution. âLow levelâ is not defined in the penal law. This also ignores the many existing opportunities for treatment and diversion. In other words, drug dealers are getting a good deal from Bragg.
âGet Out of Jail Freeâ ZoneOne of the more dangerous and despicable aspects of this radical movement is the elimination of pretrial detention. It loathes cash bail, claims that it is racist, and is content simply to let most arrested criminals roam free prior to trial.
Bragg is following suit. Now, according to his memo, there is a âpresumption of pretrial non-incarcerationâ for the following cases:
Robbery.
Burglary.
Breaking and entering.
Carjacking.
Possession with intent to distribute any drug.
Witness tampering.
Domestic violence.
Arson.
Bribery.
Kidnapping.
Larceny.
Use of a child in sexual performance.
Criminal possession of a firearm.
Child endangerment.
Elder abuse.
Unlawful surveillance.
And more.
Thereâs a narrow class of cases where there is a presumption of pretrial incarceration, to include:
Homicide.
Class B violent felonies where a weapon causes an injury.
Sex offenses (presumably other than offenses involving âuse of a child in sexual performanceâ).
Domestic violence felonies.
CONT'D>