Record Release: Justice Department to Release 6,000 Criminals into America’s Streets
President Barack Obama’s friends over at the DOJ are releasing roughly 6,000 criminals back into America’s streets by Nov. 2, supposedly to ease “overcrowding” and to offset “harsh sentences”.
The new releases include roughly 2,000 criminal foreign migrants, contradicting claims that illegal immigrants don’t contribute to crime. The migrants are to be repatriated to their home countries.
The Obama administration is trying to distance itself from the mass release, but Obama and other Democrats appointed most of the legal professionals now running the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which directed lower jail penalties for some crimes and backdated rules to allow the releases. The group is headed by judges and political lawyers who are allied with the Democratic Party, not by politicians who face an election in 2016.
Over the last year, violent crime has risen in many cities as murder rates have spiked 16 percent, while Obama and his allies have tried to stigmatize and regulate state and local police. The increased murder-rate has added up to 482 extra dead Americans under Obama’s policies.
That spike in crime is likely to frighten middle-class voters and make crime a hot issue in the 2016 election. According to the Post:
The inmates from federal prisons nationwide will be set free by the department’s Bureau of Prisons between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2. Most of them will go to halfway houses and home confinement before being put on supervised release.
The early release follows action by the U.S. Sentencing Commission — an independent agency that sets sentencing policies for federal crimes — which reduced the potential punishment for future drug offenders last year and then made that change retroactive…
The panel estimated that its change in sentencing guidelines eventually could result in 46,000 of the nation’s approximately 100,000 drug offenders in federal prison qualifying for early release. The 6,000 figure, which has not been reported previously, is the first tranche in that process….
Critics, including some federal prosecutors, judges and police officials, have raised concerns that allowing so many inmates to be released at the same time could cause crime to increase…
Along with the commission’s action, the Justice Department has instructed its prosecutors not to charge low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who have no connection to gangs or large-scale drug organizations with offenses that carry severe mandatory sentences.
However, judges are keeping some of the more famous prisoners in jail, despite Obama’s pro-amnesty policies. The article goes on:
For example, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth recently denied requests from two top associates of Rayful Edmond III, one of the District’s most notorious drug kingpins.
Federal prosecutors did not oppose a request by defense lawyers to have the associates, Melvin D. Butler and James Antonio Jones, released early in November. But last month Lamberth denied the request, which would have cut about two years from each man’s projected 28 1/2 -year sentence.
‘The court struggles to understand how the government could condone the release of Butler and Jones, each convicted of high-level, sophisticated and violent drug-trafficking offenses,’ Lamberth wrote. The Edmond group imported as much as 1,700 pounds of Colombian cocaine a month into the city in the 1980s, according to court papers.’
