It’s High Time Liberal Judges are Held Accountable for Failing to Lock Up Violent Career Criminals

By Miranda Devine

Liberal judges who decide not to jail violent career criminals and sadistic psychopaths ought to be held liable when the felons attack innocent citizens.

Two horrendous, unprovoked attacks on helpless young women on public transit in recent weeks would never have happened if the legal system had done what it’s designed to do.

Instead, BLM-inspired reparatory justice has endangered the most vulnerable among us — women, children, the elderly and disabled. We pay police and judges to keep evil and dangerous predators away from weak and defenseless innocents. Yet radical Democrats who have taken over blue cities are hellbent on a destructive ideological crusade to defund the police, close the jails and install obedient judges who side with the perpetrator over the victim.

And yet law-abiding citizens who dare to try to defend themselves — or gallantly protect others, as in the case of good Samaritan Daniel Penny — are the ones arrested, prosecuted and even sent to jail. Queens senior citizen Charles Foehner has just been sentenced to four years in jail for gun offenses after shooting dead his mugger.

‘Barbaric’

Two cases in the last three months illustrate the moral inversion of law and order that Democrats have instituted under the cover of COVID and the anti-cop George Floyd protests of 2020.

Bethany MaGee, 26, was severely burned on her face and body when she was doused in gasoline and set on fire on Chicago’s L train last week in a what authorities have called a “barbaric and premeditated” attack by a repeat felon who had 72 arrests on his rap sheet, including aggravated arson and multiple felony battery convictions.

The suspect, Lawrence Reed, 50, reportedly yelled, “Burn alive, bitch!” as he set MaGee alight.

Reed had been deemed too dangerous to stay in the locked psychiatric wing of a Chicago hospital where he allegedly attacked a social worker and knocked her unconscious, causing a severe concussion, an eye injury and a broken tooth.

So Cook County Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez let him out on the streets in August with an ankle monitor, trusting him to abide by the curfew she set.

Of course he didn’t.

According to court transcripts obtained by Chicago crime website CWBChicago, the prosecutor objected to releasing Reed, warning that electronic monitoring would not protect “the [social worker] victim or the community from another vicious, random, and spontaneous attack.”

But Molina-Gonzalez blithely replied: “I can’t keep everybody in jail because the state’s attorney wants me to.”

According to CWBChicago, at the time he allegedly set MaGee ablaze, Reed had already violated his curfew for 12 hours — with impunity, as he had done multiple times previously.

Now he’s been charged with terrorism offenses, but it’s too late for MaGee.

An animal lover and churchgoer, she is from a close family in small-town Indiana who have requested privacy while she remains gravely ill in the hospital. Her social media posts show a young, pretty woman with long, sun-kissed hair, cuddling a cat, and smiling in family photos alongside her two brothers.

Her life will never be the same.

The attack comes just three months after a similar unprovoked murder on public transit in Charlotte, NC, when a violent repeat felon slashed the throat of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee on her way home from her job in a pizza shop.

Just like Reed, the suspect, Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, is a career criminal with a long rap sheet, including assault and armed robbery. Like Reed, he has been diagnosed with severe mental illness.

Like Reed, he was treated with kid gloves by a Democrat-controlled legal system determined to make up for past injustices against blacks by applying racial considerations to incarceration.

Since COVID and the BLM anti-cop riots of 2020, “decarceration” is the fad in every blue state and city — a term most people had never heard of outside academic circles.

It means the policy of releasing people already in jail, diverting people away from incarceration, and closing prisons and jails or blocking new ones.

Just as deinstitutionalization led to crazy homeless people everywhere, decarceration is the next logical step.

It means violent predators are free to roam, no matter what danger they pose.

Op-Ed Continues over at The New York Post:

It’s high time liberal judges are held accountable for failing to lock up violent career criminals https://t.co/KmCPmGaoN1 pic.twitter.com/uwZ2NAmX1O

— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) November 24, 2025