“Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time, Yeah, don’t do it.” – Sammy Davis, Jr., “The Theme From Baretta”
Foxnews.com reports that
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Friday that he has told prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges possible against criminal suspects – a stunning reversal of Obama-era policies, and a move that infuriated civil rights groups.
“We will enforce the laws passed by Congress pure and simple,” he said at an awards ceremony in Washington D.C, adding that prosecutors deserved to be “unhandcuffed and not micro-managed from Washington.”
“This is a key part of President Trump’s promise to keep America safe,” Sessions said. “We’re seeing an increase in violent crime in our cities – in Baltimore, Chicago, Memphis, Milwaukee, St. Louis and many others. The murder rate has surged 10 percent nationwide – the largest increase since 1968.”
In a letter to 94 U.S. attorneys Thursday night, Sessions called it a “core principle” that prosecutors charge and pursue “the most serious and readily provable offense.” Sessions defined the most serious offenses as those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence.
Sessions noted that “there will be circumstances in which good judgment would lead a prosecutor to conclude that a strict application” of the policy is not warranted, but that any exceptions must first be approved by a U.S. attorney, assistant attorney general, or a designated supervisor.
The move, which will send more criminals to jail and for longer terms by triggering mandatory minimum sentences, explicitly reverses policies set in motion by President Obama’s former Attorney General Eric Holder – who implemented the “Smart on Crime” drug sentencing policy that focused on not incarcerating people who committed low level, non-violent crimes. DOJ officials call it a “false narrative” and say unless a gun is involved, most of those cases aren’t charged period.
Officials say Holder’s “Smart on Crime” policy “convoluted the process,” and left prosecutors applying the law unevenly, which they said “is not Justice.”
But civil rights groups blasted the process, with the American Civil Liberties Union describing the move as a move that will “reverse progress” and repeat the War on Drugs, which it called a “failed experiment.”
“With overall crime rates at historic lows, it is clear that this type of one-dimensional criminal justice system that directs prosecutors to give unnecessarily long and unfairly harsh sentences to people whose behavior does not call for it did not work,” Udi Ofer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Campaign for Smart Justice.
The policy was also criticized by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who said mandatory minimums have “unfairly and disproportionately incarcerated too many minorities for too long.”
“Attorney General Sessions new policy will accentuate that injustice. Instead we should treat our nation’s drug epidemic as a health crisis and less as a lock ‘em up and throw away the key problem,” he said.
However, the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys backed the move, saying it would make the public safer and give prosecutors to “tools that Congress intended” to lock up drug dealers and dismantle gangs.
Is it just me, gentle reader, or do you also remember that Barack Hussein Obama was supposed to be the “First Post-Racial President”?
That was certainly not the reality of his eight year long tenure.
The moment Obama got into office, all average Americans heard from him was the Rhetoric of Racial Division and Class Warfare.
It reminded me of all the historical conflicts which I used to read about, during the course in college which I took, titled “The Rhetoric of Social Protest“.
Karl Marx knew long ago that all you needed to do to touch the heart of the common man was to convince him of a shared struggle.
Vladimir Lenin took this a step further, by using the concept of a shared struggle to convince the Bolsheviks to help him overthrow the Czar of Russia and murder him and his family during the Russian Revolution.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but fiery rhetoric spoken by a national leader and his “New Bolsheviks” has consequences.
President Barack Hussein Obama is as responsible for what happened in Ferguson, New York, Baltimore, and is still happening in cities across America, as any thug wannabe in those cities.
However, he is not alone in his responsibility.
Also responsible are the black political leaders, who make their living and get their 15 minutes of fame by exacerbating racially-divided situations. Their silence speaks volumes.
For example, by the Mayor of Baltimore, purposely giving carte blanche to the rioters to destroy her city by ordering the police to stand down, she, like the Roman Emperor Nero, lit the match that set her kingdom ablaze.
If Black Lives truly do matter (and, make no mistake, they do), it is the black community who are going to have to save themselves.
With a nationwide illegitimate birth rate of 74%, black Americans, with help from Uncle Sugar, have succeeded in tearing apart the very thing that kept them safe and strong for decades: the Black Family Unit.
Until that Sacred Foundation, which taught individual responsibility to generations of black Americans, is restored, the violence, crime, and disrespect for others will continue.
I remember, as a 9 year old in Memphis, Tennessee, watching my parents’ black and white television as the National Guard was called into action on the night that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
I remember after that Civil Defense Announcement that President Lyndon Johnson come on national television to make the announcement of Dr. King’s death. I remember a feeling of helplessness and of fear, as a nine-year-old, that I had not felt before.
It wasn’t just the fact that we were living in Midtown Memphis, that made me afraid.
It wasn’t just the fact of the out-of-control violence itself, that caused my consternation.
It was watching my beloved Hometown on the verge of going up in flames.
And now, all these years later, Memphis is the one of the Most Dangerous Cities in America, as ranked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and has borne witness to 73 homicides so far the year, the overwhelming majority of which were black Memphians killing one another.
Words can hurt or words can heal.
A President who was supposed to bridge the Racial Divide in this nation…instead, widened it to the point of possibly creating an unbridgeable chasm of racial animus.
And, with every divisive word he and the political activists whom he championed still speak, the chasm of Racial Divisiveness, which has created this gaping hole in the fabric of American Society, grows wider.
Words mean things.
And to say that enforcing our nation’s laws is an act of discrimination, is to create and encourage a self-fulfilling prophecy of limiting future generations of young black men and women’s confidence in themselves and their ability to rise above their circumstances, as others have, and to live the American Dream as others before them have…not by pushing drugs or robbing Little Caesar’s Pizza Parlors, but by becoming the next Dr. Ben Carson or Dr. Alveda King or Condoleeza Rice.
For as President Ronald Wilson Reagan reminded my generation,
There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.
Until He Comes,
KJ
FOR SALE: One Vintage World War II Rifle. Dropped once. Never fired.
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