It looks like John Bel Edwards’ last major action as a lame-duck governor might end up being the ultimate revelation of who he is as a politician. Namely, that Edwards is the criminals’ best friend despite all of his rhetoric about coming from a law enforcement family.
Giving clemency to all of the murderers on Death Row? Yep. That’s who John Bel Edwards is. And even the other Democrats are gasping in shock.
Governor John Bel Edwards published a letter Wednesday calling for the state’s Board of Pardons to hear the cases of 56 death row inmates seeking to have their sentences commuted.
The move comes after a July 24 meeting during which the board effectively delayed in making a decision on whether to hear those cases.
Read the letter from the governor here.
The pardon board was flooded with requests from all of the state’s inmates on death row earlier this year after Governor Edwards, who’s nearing the end of his last term in office, publicly acknowledged that he opposed the death penalty.
Prosecutors across the state have come out against the push to clear Louisiana’s death row, with East Baton Rouge DA Hillar Moore saying the state was breaking its own rules in an effort to consider clemency for the “worst of the worst.”
“This is extremely troubling to us,” Moore said Wednesday. “It’s contrary to what the law is and what the process has been and speaking to victims today, following this letter because we have to notify them about what’s going on, they feel like they are on a roller coaster ride of emotions.”
In response to the governor’s letter Wednesday, the Louisiana District Attorneys Association published its own statement, saying that prioritizing the requests from death row inmates was “inappropriate and a direct affront to the victims and their families.”
Edwards is protesting that just because he empties Death Row it doesn’t mean these guys will go free; they’ll just go back to the general population in prison and they’ll be there for the rest of their lives.
Except that won’t be up to him, and it isn’t uncommon at all for somebody who’s supposed to serve life in prison to end up getting paroled or otherwise released.
What nobody seems to recognize about Edwards is that this is nothing new. It goes all the way back to the 2015 gubernatorial campaign, when David Vitter tried to warn everybody that Edwards was all about the crooks – and for his trouble Vitter was called a racist and attacked by Gary Chambers on a stage at Southern University, in one of the more unappetizing moments of that campaign.
We covered that whole mess and had the situation described perfectly, not that anybody was listening.
John Bel Edwards went around the state bragging that as governor he would spring 5,500 inmates from Louisiana’s prisons…
…and when Vitter put out an ad hammering him on that promise he was savaged, because the ad used the “racist” word “thug.”
It was a classic case of media manipulation, but what got lost was that Edwards set a goal of releasing a set number of prisoners not because he’d reviewed the files and saw that 5,500 people were unjustly imprisoned, or who had been rehabilitated, but because that was how our incarceration rate could go below Mississippi’s.
Which, as Vitter said during his struggle session with Chambers back in November of 2015, was a completely unserious, irresponsible approach to criminal justice reform.
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So Edwards gets elected, and criminal justice reform is one of his first big efforts (after he threatened to cancel college football in the state if he didn’t get the biggest tax increase in Louisiana history, which the legislature stupidly allowed him to have), and no sooner is it put into place than crime blossoms into a full-on pandemic in our cities.
We have three of the 10 most dangerous cities in the whole country now, though that isn’t an entirely new thing. Louisiana has always had a massive crime problem; you get that when your private-sector economy is sclerotic, which ours has been pretty much ever since the Civil War with a few exceptions, your schools don’t educate and your demographics suffer from not enough new people moving in with fresh ideas and new energy.
What that meant was that Louisiana needed to have the highest incarceration rate in America; when you have the most criminals, you need the most inmates, because otherwise you have thugs roaming the streets hurting people and stealing things.
And thugs roaming the streets hurting people and stealing things is the lasting legacy of Edwards’ time in office. While he’s done absolutely nothing about it. It’s so bad that Edwards has allowed the Louisiana State Police to fall some 300 officers under its funded strength through sheer neglect.
And now he wants to clear out all the murderers on Death Row, who were put there by the people of Louisiana as expressed by the votes of jurors.
Can we finally agree about who this man is? Can we at long last recognize he’s an unhinged leftist who takes the side of criminals against law-abiding citizens? Can we finally admit that simply going to West Point for four years doesn’t make you an honorable man?
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