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In article <unu9j3$3vnnn$5@dont-email.me>
fudgepacker <patriot1@protonmail.com> wrote:

Democrats promote homosexual child molesting and do not hold nigger criminals responsible.

Serial looter committed serious crimes, never spent a day in
prison

<https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/pjimage-1.jpg>

Arlington County commonwealth's attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti
(D.) and Fairfax County commonwealth's attorney Steve Descano

Two George Soros-backed prosecutors in suburban Washington,
D.C., bounced a serial looter who committed multiple grand
larcenies and assaulted a cop between their offices for years
without a felony conviction.

Fairfax County commonwealth's attorney Steve Descano (D.) and
Arlington County commonwealth's attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti
(D.) since 2020 dismissed or declined to prosecute a 25-year-old
Maryland resident for nearly a dozen charges related to larceny.
The looting incidents amounted to thousands of dollars in stolen
merchandise and include felony offenses, including two grand
larcenies and one assault on a police officer, making the
offender eligible for years behind bars. The prosecutors found
the looter guilty of just a few misdemeanors. No verdict levied
more than a few hundred dollars in fines, and he served no time
in prison.

The out-of-state offender, Ronald Thomas, spent virtually no
time in jail after his arrests thanks to bail reform policies
instituted by Descano and Dehghani-Tafti. At least five times he
was charged for committing crimes in one jurisdiction while on
pretrial release in another. He was twice charged for committing
larcenies within a day of having similar larceny charges
dropped—with one of those incidents happening in the same county.

The case exemplifies the degree to which lightened sentencing
can embolden repeat offenders. Studies have shown that releasing
defendants before their trial increases crime. A few years after
Cook County, Ill., instituted bail reform, a 2020 study by the
University of Utah found a 45 percent increase in the number of
released defendants who were charged with committing new crimes
and a 33 percent bump in released defendants charged with
violent crimes.

"When you lower the likelihood of pretrial detention through
bail reform, you increase the number of pretrial defendants who
are going to be out on the street," Rafael Mangual, a senior
fellow and head of research for policing and public safety at
the Manhattan Institute, told the Washington Free Beacon.
"There's going to be an increase in crime."

Those subsequent crimes also tend to be more violent. "You
always hear about the nonviolent drug offender or the nonviolent
property crime," Mangual said. "The reality is that there's
actually a lot of overlap between who commits violent offenses
and who commits lower-level misdemeanors."

Thomas is no exception. In between when his Virginia cases were
opened and dropped, he was charged with theft, robbery, and
assault in neighboring Maryland.

Democratic megadonor George Soros donated more than half-a-
million dollars to Descano's and Dehghani-Tafti's 2019
campaigns, helping them oust veteran prosecutors who had served
a combined 60 years in their counties. Both ran on a progressive
criminal justice platform, promising to end cash bail in most
cases and reduce incarceration. They've kept those promises and
pointed to a general crime decrease as proof of their platform's
success. Their critics have countered that fewer convictions can
mask the true crime rate.

"You can't claim crime has decreased when you've also bragged
about not prosecuting over 20 types of crimes," Virginia
attorney general Jason Miyares (R.) told the Washington Free
Beacon. "The crime hasn't gone away—only the prosecution."

Miyares also told the Free Beacon the Virginia prosecutors'
pattern of light prosecution will lead to more victims.

"Just because a crime is ‘nonviolent' does not mean there was no
victim or that no innocent life has been affected," Miyares
said. "These far-left prosecutors repeatedly dropped charges
against a serial larcenist and allowed him to commit more crimes
and victimize more Virginians because they prioritize ideology
instead of public safety."

Descano and Dehghani-Tafti did not respond to a request for
comment.

In the past few years, states such as New York and New Jersey
have passed laws allowing for pretrial release in most cases.
Cities including Philadelphia and San Francisco have followed
suit. San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin (D.)
abolished cash bail in 2020 and has opposed many felony
convictions, including for drug-dealing charges, robberies, and
larceny. The liberal prosecutor is now facing a recall effort
amid a spike in homicides, violent shootings, overdoses, and
retail theft.

Thomas carried out his larceny spree as attitudes toward looting
shifted since the summer of 2020. Politicians, activists, and
writers on the left defended the practice during riots around
race that summer in America's cities. In one notable example,
NPR interviewed the writer Vicky Osterweil, whose 2019 book In
Defense of Looting argued the practice was a "joyous and
liberatory" response to the injustices of a
"cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist society." Reports showed
many looters came from out of state to participate and often
escaped without charges—an outcome underwritten by progressive
bail laws and lightened sentencing guidelines.

Virginia changed its law for larceny sentencing in July 2020
under former Democratic governor Ralph Northam, doubling the
felony threshold from $500 to $1,000. Liberal criminal justice
reform groups such as Justice Forward Virginia and the Virginia
ACLU had long advocated for the move. Justice Forward in 2021
also backed ending third-strike felonies for petit larceny,
noting the "disparate racial and economic impacts that such
legislation creates among people of color and the poor."

Even given the raised sentencing threshold in Virginia, one of
the grand larcenies Thomas allegedly committed in Fairfax
totaled $4,000—more than four times the new felony threshold.
Former members of the Fairfax County commonwealth's attorneys'
office who spoke with the Free Beacon said choosing not to
prosecute felony grand larcenies is rare.

Arlington County has yet to publish its 2021 annual crime
report. In 2020, property destruction, auto theft, robbery, and
assault all rose in the county. Fairfax County in 2021 saw an
uptick in violent crimes, including a 40 percent increase in
homicide.

The Free Beacon reported in March how Descano's office in 2021
dropped felony charges on a man arrested for attempting to
abduct and defile a hotel housekeeper. One year later, the man
was arrested again after he allegedly killed two homeless men
and wounded three others during a nine-day shooting spree in
D.C. and New York City.

Those who oppose Descano, Dehghani-Tafti, and Loudoun County
commonwealth's attorney Buta Biberaj, another Soros-backed
prosecutor, launched efforts to recall the trio in 2022. The
groups, Stand Up Virginia and Virginians for Safe Communities,
say they are motivated by the dangers liberal prosecutors pose
to public safety.

"Yet another career criminal victimizes the community with total
impunity because a radical prosecutor-activist handed him a ‘get
out of jail free' card," said Virginians for Safe Communities
president Sean Kennedy. "This case is not the exception any
longer, it's the rule."

Thomas was extradited to Montgomery County, Md., on May 24,
according to the Fairfax County Detention Center. He is set to
stand trial in June on charges of second-degree assault, theft,
and robbery, as well as in July on charges of theft valued at
more than $1,500. He was charged in Prince George's County, Md.,
in 2020 for theft, only to have those charges dropped a year
later.

Published under: Crime, Feature, George Soros

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/why-the-looting-wont-stop/

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