WWL-TV in New Orleans did a piece earlier this week on a story we had heard about a few days back. Pat Dennis is a doctor in New Orleans who had his car stolen by a group of punks in a carjacking incident. The kids were caught, ultimately, but it was at that point when things got worse.

The video…

This isn’t an isolated case. It happens all the time in the judicial system in Louisiana’s cities, and it can’t sustain.

You have judges who are absolutely on the side of the criminal class and go overboard trying to keep even violent ones out of prison.

In Baton Rouge that’s beginning to go critical. A great example of it was the case of Luke Simmons, who had killed two people and was given a $115,000 bail in December by a judge named Eboni Rose Johnson. Simmons then shot somebody else.

Johnson and another judge, Trudy White, are famous for coddling violent felons.

But in New Orleans, you’ve got the Soros-backed Jason Williams, who’s such a complete disaster it’s not even funny, as the district attorney. And Williams’ office is building a reputation for the kind of suspicious incompetence you saw in the Dennis case when they didn’t even bother to line him up as a witness at the trial when he was absolutely willing to do it.

You have to have a functioning judicial system. You have to prosecute cases of violent crime – and carjacking and other armed robberies are violent crimes.

Because if you don’t do those things, you open up Pandora’s Box. You create horrors.

You create a crime rate that’s out of control. But the crime is the disease. All too often, it isn’t the virus that kills the patient but the immune response to it. And you’re going to see an immune response to this kind of lawlessness.

You’ll remember the Merritt Landry case in New Orleans a few years ago when a homeowner shot to death a teenaged burglar who was on his property in the wee hours of the morning in the Bywater. That wasn’t vigilantism; it was self-defense. A little stronger case was the truck owner in New Orleans who rigged a flash-bang grenade to blow up in the face of a car thief.

Stronger yet is what’s coming. You now have the New Orleans Police Department, which can’t hire enough cops to patrol the streets, now hiring civilians to handle back-office functions and some investigative work (the investigative piece is absolutely a good idea; it’s an excellent way to leverage all the private investigators out there and bring some talent into an area which badly needs it), but what’s soon to come is neighborhoods essentially creating militias.

And you will have people taking the law into their own hands and making fresh corpses out of criminals the legal system lets off scot-free. That is going to happen, and what’s more it’s going to be met with utter indifference by those same cops and prosecutors who aren’t doing anything about those criminals in the first place.

It’s all going to break down. You can’t have an entire political class who choose not to prioritize law and order when governing a high-crime state like Louisiana or high-crime cities like New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport, without it breaking down.

We’d love to pin this on John Bel Edwards. And a whole lot of it falls directly on his head. But people elected these horrific judges and district attorneys who, like a virus, have weakened the criminal justice system. Those people are now suffering for those mistakes. The question is whether they’re going to learn anything.