I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We’re in the age of LAWLESSNESS.
We’re seeing it come in multiple forms.
First, it happens when some people are not charged for actual offenses. We saw that recently with Darrell Brooks, the Waukesha, Wisconsin, motorist who allegedly ran over dozens of adults and children at a Christmas parade, killing six. He’d been charged for numerous crimes over his lifetime and was never held accountable for their seriousness.
Then we have the recent case of school shooter Ethan Crumbley – and his parents. In this case, the prosecutors seem determined to make the punishment fit the crimes – even though the laws on the books may not fit them.
It’s just one more way that prosecutors become a law unto themselves.
Former U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy said in an interview with Fox News that the laws on the books are being stretched on the basis of emotion.
“I really think it’s outrageous. I mean, I understand it because people are very hot, emotions are very raw, this was a heinous act (the Michigan school shooting),” McCarthy said. “It’s going to be the subject of a prosecution where the kid who did the shooting who’s going to be treated as an adult, which the prosecutors have the discretion to do, is appropriately looking at multiple life counts and attempted murder counts. You know, he can’t live long enough to serve the number of years that are going to be imposed in this case, but we’re not supposed to make criminal law on the fly.”
Making criminal law on the fly. That’s a good way to put it.
“The state of Michigan has considered a number of times enacting a law, this child access prevention law that many states have adopted, which would make criminal what happened here, which was the that the parents allowed the child to get access to the weapon,” McCarthy said. “But the state of Michigan has decided not to enact that law. And you can argue that that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but the fact is it’s a thing – and it’s up to the legislature to make the criminal law. So what happened here is they don’t have a law to prosecute what the parents did even though the legislature’s considered it and not enacted it.”
That is up to the legislature to do – before the crime occurs, not after.
“So at a time when everybody’s hot and emotions are raw, prosecutors are creating a crime on the fly to attach to these parents. And if you think about it, it doesn’t make much more sense to accuse them of complicity in murder, any more than it makes sense to accuse the school officials of murder,” McCarthy continued. “I mean, yes, everybody dropped the ball here, but let’s be real about who committed the murder and who didn’t.”
Jonathan Turley, another prominent lawyer, says McCarthy has a real point.
Said Turley in a set of tweets: “There is a risk to improvisational element in charging such a case. The question is whether there is actual knowledge or complicity by the parents as opposed to negligence. Otherwise, charges in this case could present strong grounds for challenge. Andy McCarthy has argued that the prosecutors seem to be ‘making their own law’ in these charges. That may be so. Prosecutors will have to make a case that this is not just a workaround the absence of a child access prevention law.”
Noted McCarthy: “I’ve never heard of a case where you see parents get charged under circumstances where there’s no evidence that they had any complicity in a plan or something where you know there was an actual objective to kill people, and I’ve seen a lot of cases like this and … you want to wring the necks of the people who are involved in them.
“I was involved, for example, in terrorism investigations where people sold components that were obviously components for explosives like explosive powder to people who were very suspicious characters and wanted to pay in cash and made you think that, you know, boy these guys must be up to no good. Nobody thought that once a building got bombed and people got killed that the store owners who lawfully sold these components to these suspicious characters should have been charged with terrorism crimes even though you wanted to grab each of them by the lapels and say what on earth were you thinking.”
It’s one more way our land is becoming more LAWLESS – too many people in positions of power are making it up as they go along.
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