Waukesha Killing Suspect The Latest Criminal Freed By Soft-On-Crime DA
Dan O'Donnell
Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm has launched an investigation into what he called the “inappropriately low” bail set for Darrell Brooks, Jr., the suspect in the deadly Christmas parade attack in nearby Waukesha, Wis. Sunday afternoon.
Brooks, who faces five counts of first-degree intentional homicide, was freed after posting $1,000 bail even though he faces serious felony charges in two different open cases in Milwaukee. In the most recent, he allegedly “ran [the victim] over with his vehicle” in what proved to be an ominous foreshadowing of the horror he allegedly inflicted just days later.
“The bail recommendation in this is not consistent with the approach of the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office toward matters involving violent crime,” Chisholm said in a news release, “nor was it consistent with the risk assessment of the defendant prior to setting of bail.”
This is a nauseating lie: Inappropriately and dangerously low bail recommendations have been a hallmark of the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office since Chisholm, a liberal Democrat, was first elected in 2007.
Releasing Dangerous People Into the Community
One of the nation’s first proudly progressive reformers elected as a major city’s lead prosecutor, Chisholm almost immediately implemented an “evidence-based approach” that relied heavily on deferred prosecution and early intervention programs aimed at keeping criminals out of jail. No longer would the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office request high bails for criminal suspects or even prosecute their crimes. Instead, they would pursue alternatives that Chisholm fully admitted would result in dangerous felons being released into the community.
“Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into a treatment program, who is going to go out and kill somebody?” You bet,” Chisholm said in a 2007 interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”
From the moment he was sworn in, Chisholm understood that his radical reimagining of criminal prosecution would result in the loss of innocent lives but, chillingly, he viewed this as a necessary sacrifice. In 2010, the Journal Sentinel reviewed Chisholm’s deferred prosecution program and found “dozens of examples that raise questions about how the…program is being implemented.”
More than 200 defendants charged with such serious offenses as felony sexual assault, armed robbery, felony assault of a police officer, felony child abuse, and high-volume cocaine trafficking were never prosecuted. Easily the most stomach-turning was Cedric B. Young, 51, who was given a deferred prosecution agreement on charges of sexually assaulting a two-year-old girl.
He faced a maximum sentence of 60 years in prison but was never prosecuted after a psychologist his attorneys hired testified that “he did not consider Young a pedophile”—even though Young admitted to sexually assaulting a baby. He was released without ever serving a day in prison.
Of the more than 900 defendants who were given these sorts of sweetheart deals, 30 percent violated them by committing new crimes, failing to appear in court, or failing to fill court-ordered requirements. At least a dozen defendants were given deferred agreements even though they already had extensive criminal records.
One of them, Shermaine Worthy, “had had at least 14 prior felony and misdemeanor convictions for drug offenses, burglary, forgery and escape before he got a deferred agreement in 2009 on marijuana and theft charges. Less than a week later, the agreement was revoked when he was arrested for breaking into a car.”
thefederalist.com
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