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I present to you a true crime story from Miami from last year – I’m assuming it wasn’t discussed here yet.
"This fella is a really bad guy. He is the epitome of evil. He hunts his prey. He’s patient with his prey, and then he kills them," Miami Beach Police Chief Wayne A. Jones said at a news conference last month. “There’s no doubt in my mind, had he not been caught, he would’ve done this again and again and again."
According to detectives, Zsolyomi is a Hungarian national listed as an illegal overstay by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He wore an ankle monitor after he was released from custody from a robbery arrest in Miami Beach in July of 2024.
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/man-accused-of-murdering-elderly-victims-in-miami-miami-beach-pleads-not-guilty/3565482/
The Hungarian man who police said was responsible for two brutal murders in Miami-Dade County is now believed to have been targeting members of the LGBTQ+ community.[…] Zsolyomi is facing two counts of second-degree murder from the cases dating back to November and January, in which police said he had befriended both men before strangling them to death. Zsolyomi is currently being held without bond and he has been placed on an immigration hold because authorities said he overstayed his visa.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/hungarian-zsolt-zsolyomi-miami-beach-little-havana-murders-lgbtq-targeting/
A Hungarian national who was set to be deported disabled his ankle monitor before he murdered two men in Miami-Dade County, triggering an investigation that led to his arrest, federal authorities said.[…] Investigators said the monitor was placed on him a month earlier by ICE officials while at the Krome Detention Center in West Miami-Dade.
In a statement, an ICE spokesperson wrote that in July of 2024, “Miami Beach Police arrested Zsolyomi for strong-arm robbery, [and] he was encountered by ICE” shortly thereafter.
Federal authorities said the Hungarian was in the U.S. illegally and scheduled to be deported, but in September, the ICE statement reads, “He was processed and then released” with the GPS monitor.
https://wsvn.com/news/local/miami-dade/ice-hungarian-national-charged-in-miami-south-beach-murders-was-set-to-be-deported-before-crimes/
Obviously a clear-cut case it is. Since then it was reported that he’s probably getting sentenced to death. What possible culture war angle is there besides the involvement of ICE, you might ask? Well, I’m not much of a true crime nerd and don’t know much about law enforcement procedures, but I’ll say this: when the guy was arrested for armed robbery, I’m sure he still had his passport in his possession. Would have he just thrown it away after his tourist visa expired? I’d be surprised.
It’s not like I’m expecting much of any police force anywhere, but had they checked his identity and then contacted Hungarian authorities, they’d have learned that there are multiple outstanding arrest warrants against him. He’s the sort of dime-a-dozen criminal hoodlum who was probably never planning to do a single day of honest work in his life and he isn’t even a nobody, as he participated in an episode of some lame-ass local TV reality show. Had they learned about this in time, I assume federal authorities could have just deported him to his native country, right? Not only is he a criminal, by the way, but also a white guy, probably a bisexual, but is not identifying as a homosexual, so he wasn’t even going to get any sympathy points.
To address another aspect, him being described as ‘targeting members of the LGBTQ+ community’ sort of insinuates that these were somehow hate crimes, when in reality he was simply selecting victims who had money and were easy to victimize, and took pretty much the easiest path there is.
And there’s a sort of funny aspect to this too: there are local liberal-leaning news sites simply describing him as an ‘illegal immigrant’. Technically speaking he is one indeed, but the journalists in question have otherwise completely adopted US Blue Tribe narratives on no human being illegal, welcoming refugees etc. and would never describe anyone as an ‘illegal immigrant’ in other contexts.
We’ve completely given up putting people in prison in this country.
Armed robbery and he’s out with an ankle monitor?
I’d vote for anyone who says ‘ commit a violent offense and never leave prison ‘ Give them books and stuff but never let them out.
That’s the culture war angle: the left is wrong about our prison system and the right won’t do anything to fix it.
Not just the USA, I've been reading a couple of stories in the Irish media recently which left me going "how the fuck did this guy get bail? what was wrong with that judge?"
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Too many violent offenses, not enough prisons.
The only solutions are death, corporal punishment, mass prison construction or what we're doing now, which is catch and release.
There are some other options, but they generally fall under "cruel and unusual", at least according to current lawyers.
Yes, but we could just build more prisons. As an example, almost all prisoners are in state prison, California spends something like 6 or 7% of its budget on the state Department of Corrections. That implies a few percent of the state budget could be used to double the prison population. Unless there is some massive dis-economy of scale.
Those prisons are already built. Building new prisons could easily cost much much more than operating current ones.
Americans have to swallow their pride and learn from most successful prison abolition movement of our time. It can be done.
Yea, the Wagner solution is the solution America needs. American prisoners yearn to get out of cage, American army yearns for patriotic volunteers, Iran yearns for freedom and democracy. Everyone can win.
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That would fall to "hard cases make bad law" in no time flat.
The first one that comes to mind: although personally I'm a big First Amendment fan, and I don't think there should even be a "fighting words" exception, I also think there should be room for some leniency toward people who are triggered by some types of "fighting words". "Talk shit and the guy who punches you will get arrested and maybe serve some time" would be justice enough and wouldn't set up as many bad incentives as "Talk shit to a guy and take a punch and you can see him put away for life" would.
Also: this only works if you can first solve the problem of bad DAs ... but if you could then that alone would already greatly reduce the problem. If you've got a garbage DA who might consider dismissing felony charge after felony charge after felony charge before each of their beneficiaries finally hospitalizes and/or kills a victim, they'll just be even more likely to dismiss charges when they know the consequences of not doing so are even harsher. He was just about to turn his life around!
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Isn't some of that downstream from a limited supply of prison housing? I remember when Covid happened, and because prisoners are the one group in the United States whose health is the responsibility of the US government, a lot of non-violent prisoners were temporarily being released to house arrest in order to aid in social distancing, because otherwise the prisons would just be petri dishes of disease.
So, isn't the problem in many cases (varies by region I'm sure), that there just aren't enough prisons to hold all the people we might want to imprison? In which case the answer is "easy", just make more prisons. Except that because of NIMBYism, everyone tries to make sure that the prison doesn't get built near their neighborhood and hardly anything gets built half the time.
I think it's largely a consequence of US liberal leftists, including ones who consider themselves moderate and centrist-adjacent, having adopted a completely dismissive and critical attitude towards the War on Drugs, largely as one expression of their hard antagonism towards Nixon and Reagan, and in turn having adopted the same attitude towards the steep growth of incarcerations rates during the Reagan and Clinton years. (The growth was indeed steep, to be sure.) As layman I think they are interpreting this whole phenomenon as thus: it was all done to cynically pander to disgusting white middle-class racist garbage humans and it represented an absolute erosion and betrayal of the glorious wonder that was the Civil Rights Movement. Yet again the helpless black minority was thrown under the bus to suffer in AmeriKKKa. Nixon and Reagan were just horrible ghouls. That Clinton guy may have been sort of decent, but when he actually tried to implement rather moderate measures to advance liberalism, GOP goons rallied their deplorable base against him, and when the Democrats lost seats in the Senate and the House, unfortunately he had no choice but to compromise with these twats who just wanted to keep throwing disadvantaged black men in prison en masse. We cannot let this happen again.
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Prisons are built mostly in deep rural areas that are poor enough to welcome employment prospects of working as guards, or in situations where the government doesn't have local veto points(military bases etc), for precisely NIMBY reasons. This is a known and solved problem, and with enough money we could build enough prison to hold anyone who's gotten a jaywalking ticket.
The problem is getting people to prison. First, they need to be arrested. Mostly solved, but you've got to have a place to hold these people until trial and sentencing(takes a really long time, because these people have no incentive to play ball), and jail is usually located in urban/suburban areas reasonably near the scene of the crime. So you give people bail or an ankle monitor, because for constitutional reasons you can't just build the jail in the middle of nowhere where the alternative is cornfields/forests, so there's space limitations(and a lot of these jails are in downtown areas where there just literally isn't more room to expand). Then there's getting through the criminal justice process; our system relies on a large percentage of the (overwhelmingly guilty)suspects pleading guilty in exchange for reduced sentencing, but even that is way at the high end of the bandwidth our system has. You'd need a lot more judges and lawyers.
I say this all the time, look at pretty much any case where someone got off light and you'll almost always find that they pled guilty to it. It's basically impossible to get someone to not take things to trial unless you give them a really nice deal, so a lot of a prosecutor's job is just triaging their resources, trying to balance the various factors between likelyhood to win at a trial/severity of the crime/who will actually take a plea deal/etc.
It lets off the guilty, but it also has the opposite effect too of punishing the innocent. Completely innocent people don't have the time or resources to fight in court and their defense attorneys are probably swamped as well, so they're also incentived to just take a plea deal. There's plenty of cases where people have a strong alibi/evidence to prove they are innocent and yet take a plea deal anyway because it's better than the actual process.
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