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This past Sunday in Chicago, a 32 year old man killed three people. What made this much more notable than the typical Chicago weekend killings:
The man was caught on video (extreme violence warning) executing his victims in cold blood at close quarters.
The victims didn't seem to be gangbangers, but rather family and friends of a 25 year old girl celebrating her birthday at a nearby bar where the dispute took place. One unscientific hint: the moment gunshots rang out, the victims' instinct wasn't to run or hide, but to attend to the earlier victims, gesture disbelief, and generally show no survival instincts.
The suspect was recently paroled after just 4 years in prison from a 2009 double murder in a home invasion. My quick search seemed to suggest that the 2009 case had some issues, either because he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger, or there was insufficient evidence to prove that he did. So he was allowed to plead down to home invasion and was sentenced for just 8 years.
The judge who sentenced the suspect for the 2009 case himself resigned in 2020 over allegations of sexual harassment. The linked article contains bonus culture war fodder, like how the ex-judge claimed that his "[unwanted] gestures of physical affection" were "part of his Colombian heritage".
IL's SAFE-T Act goes into effect Jan 1, 2023, and among other provisions, eliminates cash bail.
I'm curious how much national attention this will receive. My guess is not much. Chicago has had 660+ murders so far in 2022, or 13+ per week, so one man killing three isn't by itself remarkable. The aggravating factors above should light a match, but that they also go against the narrative will probably douse it instead. And now that we're just done with the 2022 midterms, there is no immediate political urgency to act.
My main point though is that I think society will trend toward more law-and-order as video surveillance becomes ever more ubiquitous. If this video didn't exist, no one outside of the victims' families will think twice about it. But because it does, it will surface and resurface across social media until the end of time, and no amount of narrative from academics and pundits will compete with the visceral viewer reaction that some people are simply evil and need to be locked up for life or executed. Perhaps one day we'll all be effectively wearing body cams if/when AR glasses become mainstream. I believe that future will spell a permanent end to the political expediency of criminal justice reform, at least in the way that opponents label it as being weak on crime.
The guy was caught on video and is now held without bail. What policy failure point are you identifying here?
The suspect only got 8 years for a previous double murder and home invasion, and only served half of that due to being paroled? If this was a first time offender, crim just systems's guilt would be a couple of steps away, but here it is pretty obvious.
Do you know why he was only sentenced to 8 years for a previous double murder and home invasion? What change in policy would you propose?
I'll jump in and propose a hell of a lot longer of a prison sentence for home invasion double murder. I see that there was some confusion if he or his accomplice actually pulled the trigger in that double murder. I don't care. 4 years for breaking into a home and participating in a double murder is abhorrent even if he didn't personally pull the trigger. The kind of person who chooses to participate in those acts is the kind who cannot walk free in society. I would propose at least a few decades in prison. 4 years was gross misjustice.
The US (including Illinois) already has in place the felony-murder rule which can be used as a very broad penumbra to charge any participants of a crime with murder, regardless of their direct action or intent to kill. This was used to nail Roddie Bryan with life in prison in the Arbery case, even though he was far away from the shooting that killed Arbery. So it seems to me there are already well established laws that can punish people, even if they are only tangentially involved in someone's death. Do you disagree?
Illinois already has a 25 years to life prison sentence for felony murder. To @vpn 's credit, they included a link about the 2009 incident and what the prosecutor said about that case:
According to the prosecutor, the issue was lack of evidence, but it's plausible the prosecutor is now either lying or being misleading to cover their ass. Do you find their justification credible?
Since the law on the books already has the prison sentence you desire, what would you want to see change to make it easier to get convictions? Are there any downsides to making it easier to get convictions?
[tagging @Hoffmeister25 for similar reply]
I mean, I feel like I made it pretty clear that I do not consider 25 to life a just sentence, insofar as he is still alive. I want him to no longer be alive anymore. I want not a single penny of Illinois taxpayer money to be used to keep this man alive. I have no idea why you or anyone else would actually care if he himself was the one who pulled the trigger in the death of those two people. He was invading an innocent person’s home with the intent to burglarize it. The appropriate penalty for that crime should be death.
The article in question also mentions that five years after the original home invasion which resulted in the murder of two people, Salas then plead guilty to a second home invasion in which yet another person was murdered. Surely even if you believe he deserved a second chance after his first deadly home invasion, the fact that he did it a second time should make it abundantly clear what kind of person we’re dealing with, and the right and proper steps should be taken to end his life, publicly and without delay.
I agree the article is worded ambiguously but I didn't read that as describing two separate incidents but the article was repeating itself when describing the charging timeline. Either way, the prosecutor's statement for why they offered home invasion plea deal is that they lacked evidence to proceed with murder charges. I understand what you desire in terms of punishment, but how do you deal with the evidence issue?
To me this obviously seems to refer to two separate crimes. He was charged with murder for the 2009 case, but pled down to home invasion and served an unspecified amount of time for that. Then in 2016 he was charged with murder, then pled down to home invasion and sentenced to eight years. Are you suggesting that he was tried twice for the same crime, five years apart, pled down to home invasion twice for the same crime, and served two different prison sentences for that same crime?
This where obviously I need more information - information which the article does not provide - in order to comment on the evidence issue in this particular situation. There’s a big difference between these two scenarios: 1. Salas and one or more accomplices invaded someone’s home, and in the commission of that home invasion somebody was shot. Police couldn’t determine, given the evidence at their disposal, which one of the home invaders fired the shot, so they couldn’t pin the murder on Salas specifically. 2. Police could not muster the evidence to actually place Salas at the scene of the home invasion.
In scenario 2 I obviously don’t want him executed, but scenario 2 seems wildly implausible given that Salas did in fact plead guilty to the home invasion. (I’m aware that there is the possibility that he took a plea deal for a crime which he didn’t commit in order to avoid the possibility of being convicted of an even worse crime that he also didn’t commit. The probability of this just seems far lower than I think you believe that it is.)
In scenario 1, again, it makes no difference whatsoever to me who actually directly committed the murder. If Salas committed a home invasion and nobody died, he should be executed. Don’t commit home invasions, or it’s curtains for you. I genuinely do believe this. Yes, there are edge cases; divorced couple, nasty custody battle, husband technically isn’t supposed to be in the home even though he lived there for twenty years, he still has a key, lets himself in to see his kids while ex-wife isn’t home, overzealous prosecutor charges him with home invasion. This is the sort of non-central case that is so far from what I guarantee that Salas did, I don’t think it’s worth discussing them in the same conversation.
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Do note that the IL SAFE-T act referenced above does in part limit the effective umbrella of the felony-murder rule.
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I know about felony murder. I'm wishing that the prosecution made use of it, rather than letting him admit to the relatively minor crime of home invasion and dropping everything related to his complicity in a double homicide.
As you correctly point out: lack of evidence of him directly committing the double homicide is no defense against felony murder charges. Based on my non-lawyer understanding he is indeed guilty of that crime. I don't think that the prosecutors had to let him off on that.
But now we are just getting into prosecutorial discretion. If your local DA's office declines to press charges even when it appears they could , then there is no law or reform that will help. I don't have a solution to that other than to recommend choosing DAs who choose to prosecute murderers.
And I'm not some tough-on-crime hardass. But on the edge case of a home invading double murderer getting 4 years with no attempt at felony murder charges, I'm going to start advocating for tougher prosecutors.
Given we seem to have equivalent understanding of this issue: what reform do you think I would recommend?
To get a felony-murder conviction, you have to prove (paraphrasing) that someone was trying to commit a felony crime and did so in a way that made it very likely someone would get killed or seriously hurt. I don't know anything about this case but if the prosecutors were pursuing murder charges on a felony-murder theory, the lack of evidence described could have been as far upstream as unable to prove he was even at the house (let alone that he was there to commit a felony, let alone that he pulled the trigger, etc.).
Based on the objectives you outline, electing tougher prosecutors who are more enthusiastic about pursuing even edge case charges would likely get you what you want. But this might be a risky gambit which could result in more acquittals if prosecutors are pressing their luck by overcharging or pursuing cases with bad evidence. Would you agree that's a concern? Separate from overplaying their hand, would you have any other concerns about tougher prosecutors?
Bad phasing on my part. This isn't an edge case in that it is some wobbler they would have to really reach to try to convict. I don't want extremely aggressive prosecutors throwing charges at the wall and seeing what sticks.
How I should have phrased it is: this looks like an extreme case of prosecutors letting a hard-core criminal plea out to very minor crimes. Reading some news articles it looks like no one disputes that he is a multi-time home invader. And either he or his partner in than one invasion killed two people. So where's the felony murder charges?
Also he may be a long time murderer with a pile of dead people he personally killed:
https://wgntv.com/news/chicagocrime/no-bail-for-man-charged-in-portage-park-triple-murder/amp/
And maybe the prosecutors had good reason not to go to trial on this amazing list of very serious crimes. But they didn't bother pushing for felony murder when he admits to breaking and entering with his accomplice. So I'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt here. I accept the video of his casual execution of multiple people as evidence that he may have done this before.
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I don’t want to speak for @Syo, but my proposed policy change would be to execute him, publicly, after the first offense. A home invasion and double murder is something that only the worst people alive would do. The odds of a not-guilty man being found guilty of that crime seems so astronomically low that I’m entirely comfortable baking that risk into an overall wildly-more-punitive criminal justice system than what we have now.
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Just sorta shocked there are still people in that thread repeating "crime is at an all-time low, you're imagining things." Really rubs in that facts don't matter, only Daily Show matter. How do you even engage with deliberately invincible ignorance?
I believe you but do you have any sources that demonstrate this? I have contacts who make this asinine claim and I know they won't take any of the sources I would be able to quickly find (e.g. Fox) so do you have better ones?
What sort of stuff are you looking for? Sadly most people like that are completely immunized against FBI crime statistics too, which is why I made the Daily Show comment. The best I can probably do for someone like that is a NYT/WaPo "gun deaths soar thanks to the NRA" piece, which already primes them to avoid thinking about it critically.
Here's one of the better articles, which at least puts "returned the U.S. to homicide rates not seen since the mid-1990s" in the 2nd para, and contains an FBI crime stats graph without the conspiracy theory taint of citing primary sources: https://archive.vn/uFPnM
That probably works, thanks.
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The fact that these words can fit together as a given seems the vastly more concerning trend.
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This is, of course, something that provably hasn't been true since about 2012.
In fairness it's something that could have reasonably been said as late as... 2016-8? With the caveat that "well maybe the bump from the 2015 riots was temporary, right?" But still saying it after 2021 when even the NYT's acknowledged skyrocketing crime can't be anything but working on an out of date patch of TalkingPoints.dll.
Excuse the late reply, but anyway:
as far as I know, rates of violent crime in the US have been steadily rising since about 2012, and this has accelerated two times, in 2014 (due to the Ferguson effect) and the 2020 (an even more pronounced Ferguson effect).
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Has this happened in the UK, where it has been much more ubiquitous much longer? I think not.
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Most Chicago gun violence has nothing to do with drugs. Even the gangbanger stuff is mostly because some guy talked shit about some guy on a rap video posted to YouTube.
My sense is that drug dealing doesn't usually involve shooting; it never gets to the point where someone owes 100k in drugs and someone needs to be shot.
Drug use, however, leads to lots of bad decisions. Alcohol is probably the worst in aggregate when it comes to escalating violence.
I think The Wire was accurate for Baltimore and back in the day their were wars over corners. I barely ever see a news story now that is something like that. It’s not like people don’t do drugs in NYC yet much lower murder rate than chi. And Miami obviously had some drug wars. And Mexico still has drug wars for turf.
Yeah, "The Wire" portrays the drug market structure of the period when David Simon was a beat reporter and not in the period it's actually set in. Control of "corners" is less relevant in the cell phone era when dealers can set meets with customers in a variety of locations rather than needing to hold down a single location to maintain contact. There was an interesting paper on this which relates cell phone tower density to murder rates and finds a strong correlation.
That's asking to get burned by the population heat map effect.
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Do you have a link to the paper? I want to know if they controlled for population density, which I imagine would be a major confounder.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25883/w25883.pdf
I think I misspoke in the original post, they find that cell phone towers reduce murders. They're correlating murders per capita with a measure of antenna density for each county. They use the 1970's as a kind of "placebo" because cell towers were being constructed, with obvious non random relationship to population density, in preparation for cell service being offered but cell service wasn't being offered so it wouldn't have an effect on murder rates yet. They break the data down by decade in Table 4 and find no significant relationship in the 70's, a negative relationship that isn't borderline significant in the 80's, a negative coefficient that is significant in the 90's and a coefficient approaching 0 in the 2000's, which maps on to the theory of cell phone adoption altering the structure of the drug market significantly in the 80's and 90's and reaching saturation in the 2000's.
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I've been vaguely following the new movement to ban using rappers gloating about murdering people in raps as evidence in their murder trials for murdering those people.
Combined with all the "getting his life together and becoming an aspiring rapper" in the obituaries/plea bargain letters, it seems like half the violence these days is muggers and shoplifters larping as drug dealers, then getting homicidally mad at each other for pointing out they don't deal drugs in Soundcloud feuds.
It’s black honor culture because their culture started out copying that of duel-happy romanticist planter aristocracy.
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Drug dealers and users, if anything, want minimal violence. There is nothing worse for business than drawing unnecessary attention from law enforcement.
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I think it says something incredibly dire about our civilization that we stopped publicly executing people such as this guy. I truly believe that the vast majority of people who watch this video and learn about this man’s history experience a powerful atavistic desire to see him humiliated and then hung from a tree in a public square. This is the healthy, normal human impulse that drove approaches to criminal justice in, as far as I’m aware, nearly every human society in history until practically yesterday. Maybe this is just me projecting - I’ve been the victim of a crime and very nearly the victim of several more, so my desire to see these people violently dispatched is overwhelming - but it seems to me that the level of cognitive dissonance that most people feel living in soft-hearted Western countries who treat irredeemable human detritus with kid gloves will necessary boil over in the near future, producing a law-and-order backlash like we haven’t seen in centuries.
Yes, people like this murderous burgler should be publically executed, but I really do not want people like you driving a "law and order backlash" so much so that my internal reaction to you in particular advocating for it is to defend the other side, even though rationally I can not justify that position to myself. In my opinion people like you, because of your moral and political ideological inclinations are more dangerous over the long run as a group than these psychopathic criminals and should be among those being killed, and yes this is basically me admitting that I want certain segments of my outgroup killed.
So, just to clarify, you want me executed for… impotently posting on an obscure internet forum? Perhaps you imagine that my comments are part of a larger pattern of violent or discriminatory behavior, having tangible negative effects on the lives of real flesh-and-blood individuals. But, no, it really is just impotent posting. I have perfectly normal, functional, positive relationships with people of wildly different backgrounds, none of whom are aware of, or affected by, my Motte-posting. So precisely which specific charges would you have me executed for?
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Unfortunately, I am quite certain you're not the only person here who feels that way, but we draw a pretty hard line when it comes to stating outright that you want your outgroup (to include other posters) to be killed.
1-day ban. Consider taking a break from the Internet. This kind of thinking goes nowhere good.
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Irredeemable human detritus are progressive clients and they serve Regime ends.
They drive sane, productive people with families out of cities allowing the cities to be used as vote banks in statewide and federal elections
They satiate the bloodlust of progressives who at the minimum fantasize about using them against their enemies - "don't drop the soap" (said to a guy going to jail for tweeting)
They're so destructive and incapable of living in the modern world that they require a whole host of jobs to do basic tasks for them - jobs filled by progressive clients
"Helping" people in the culture that they come from is seen as a noble good because of how bad the worst of them are and this justifies the utter insanity of the progressive urban money machine - "we need more money for dem programs"
On an even more abstract level the discomfort caused by contemplating this drives a bunch of charity due to cognitive dissonance - charity motivated by the silent idea of solving the "root causes" - "why do they act like that?!?"
Must deal with the root causes for it to work - progressives who created this situation.
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Interestingly enough, I have exactly the opposite opinion and I am in line with OPs thesis. The social media made the world a smaller place, people have feeling that they can peek into the living rooms and bedrooms of people continents away. We really are living now in a global village, which reinstated also some more visceral human instincts such as gossip, or public shaming in form of cancellation. Except with some caveats: you can literally have former murderers being famous celebrities, but god forbid if you have said something wrong 10 years ago on Twitter. You can be sure that a virtual mob will gather solely focused on ruining your life, all the while eating popcorn and having fun doing it. It is reenactment of age old tradition of pillorying somebody for perceived antisocial deed, and then having random people casually throwing garbage at him while going about your business in the town square.
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It's mostly due to suburbanization, I think. Suburbs are rather blue-pilling, and living there divorces you from the reality of human existence, such as the behavior of people like this guy.
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I think video only makes people more ingrained in their beliefs. Liberals/left will continue to blame systemic or societal factors for violence.
I feel like systemic factors are to blame for this incident. Just not the ones liberals like to harp on. If he hadn't been given such a lenient sentence this never would have happened.
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You get plenty of reactions like this in the reddit comments:
There is already a memetic response for this kind of thing. We let him out early and he committed more murders? Well we should have let him out even sooner and it would have surely fixed everything
Very probably not due to being "way too hard on people".
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I'll have to search this up, but I though the US' high incarceration rate was a function of a higher clearance rate.
That and high crime rates.
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Roughly a fifth of the prison population is in on drug charges.
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Is that actually true? I have never personally seen it. Usually the memetic response to things like that is to try to ignore the specific case and talk about better funding social services that supposedly prevent crime.
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