The man accused of brutally murdering a young Ukrainian refugee won&#8217;t face trial anytime soon, after a federal judge ruled that he&#8217;s <a href="https://www.wral.com/news/local/decarlos-brown-mental-competency-trial-june-2026/">too mentally unfit</a> to stand in a courtroom.
DeCarlos Brown Jr., 34, was found incompetent to stand trial Tuesday for the August 22, 2025, murder of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old who fled Russian bombs only to be stabbed from behind while listening to music on Charlotte&#8217;s Blue Line light rail.
She never saw it coming.
Zarutska — a college-educated artist, aspiring veterinary assistant, and devoted daughter — had <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/09/us/decarlos-brown-jr-charlotte-train-stabbing">survived</a> two years of war and built a quiet, hopeful life in North Carolina. She walked neighbors&#8217; dogs, studied English, and worked at a pizzeria. She was thriving. Then Brown allegedly plunged a pocketknife into her neck and walked away, blood dripping from the blade.
U.S. District Judge Kenneth Bell ruled Brown cannot understand the charges against him and is unable to assist his own defense. Brown&#8217;s behavior in court on Tuesday did little to dispute the claim — he repeatedly interrupted proceedings with unhinged outbursts. His team filed a motion saying he “experiences delusions that center around his belief that he was exposed to a material that controls his every movement.&#8221;
Brown will be hospitalized for up to four months. If doctors restore his competency, he&#8217;ll finally face trial — and potentially the death penalty.
This is exactly the kind of case that makes ordinary Americans furious with the insanity defense.
Brown has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/fatal-charlotte-stabbing-highlights-the-failure-of-racial-equity-policies">14 prior arrests</a>. He did five years for armed robbery. Law enforcement knew he was unwell — he called 911 claiming a government implant was controlling his body, and officers sent him home with a misdemeanor. His family begged for help. The system shrugged.
Now, after an innocent woman is murdered in cold blood — on camera, in front of passengers — the legal machinery grinds to a halt over whether the accused killer truly understood what he was doing. Experts will battle over his mental state ten months after the fact. A jury may never hear the case.
Critics of the insanity defense have long warned of exactly this: dangerous individuals cycling through a system that prioritizes their diagnosis over their victims&#8217; deaths. Four states have abolished the defense entirely for this reason.
Zarutska&#8217;s family is holding firm: &#8220;We have confidence his capacity will be restored so he can stand trial for what he did to Iryna.&#8221;
So does prosecutor Russ Ferguson. &#8220;Our number one goal is justice for Iryna Zarutska,&#8221; he said. &#8220;That&#8217;s what&#8217;s on our minds and our hearts every day.&#8221;
She deserves nothing less.

Memorial of the 23 years old Ukrainian Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte

Iryna Zarutska’s Accused Killer Won’t Be Going To Trial Anytime Soon

Courts

Criminal Justice

Insanity

Iryna Zarutska

Murder

North Carolina

U.S.

For four years, I have watched Fairfax County Commonwealth&#8217;s Attorney Steve Descano from a seat on the Virginia House Courts of Justice Criminal Subcommittee. I have read his policies, tracked the bills his political allies push in Richmond, and listened to the families on the wrong end of his charging decisions. Last Thursday on Capitol Hill, the rest of America finally got the view I have had since 2022.
It was ugly.
Under questioning from House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, Descano was asked why, one week after Congress requested his testimony, he scrubbed language from his website promising his office would &#8220;make charging and plea decisions that limit or avoid immigration consequences&#8221; and calling deportation as a criminal penalty &#8220;a perversion of justice.&#8221; That language sat on his campaign site for six years. Then, conveniently, it vanished.
His explanation was the moment of the hearing. The promises were just &#8220;a campaign statement,&#8221; he said. Voters, he suggested, were &#8220;obtuse&#8221; if they could not tell the difference between what he told them to win the election and what he actually did in office.
That is the whole sanctuary city playbook in one sentence. Tell the voters one thing. Govern as the opposite. Dare them to do anything about it.
Cheryl Minter, sitting two chairs away from Descano in that hearing room, already knew the answer. Her daughter Stephanie was stabbed to death at a Fairfax County bus stop in February by Abdul Jalloh, an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone with more than 30 prior arrests. Descano&#8217;s office dropped charge after charge. Fairfax County police warned his prosecutors in writing, three separate times, that Jalloh would seriously hurt or kill someone if he were not detained.
He did. And Marvin Morales-Ortez, an alleged MS-13 member from El Salvador, was rearrested for murder the day after Descano&#8217;s office declined to prosecute him on a prior charge. This is not a pair of unlucky outcomes. It is what the system is designed to produce when the prosecutor decides, in writing, that immigration status takes precedence over public safety.
Here is what nobody at that hearing said plainly enough, so I will: sanctuary policies are a transfer of cost and risk from people who broke the law to people who did not. Every dropped charge, every ignored ICE detainer, every Crespo plea deal designed to dodge deportation is a bill someone else pays. The Fairfax County taxpayer pays for the courts, jails, public defenders, social services, emergency rooms, and schools, while absorbing the consequences of releases that should never have happened. The Stephanie Minters of this Commonwealth pay with their lives, and taxpayers are forced to fund it.
And the bill keeps growing. The sanctuary model does not reduce crime. It recycles criminals. It does not save money. It pours money into welfare programs, housing assistance, and emergency services for populations that federal law says should not be here in the first place. It does not produce safer communities. It produces police officers writing prophetic emails to prosecutors about defendants they have arrested 10, 20, 30 times, begging them to do their jobs.
There is exactly one fix, and it is the one the open-borders Left will fight to the last breath. Enforcement. Honor the detainers. Prosecute the charges. Hand over the people federal law says have to go. Stop running the Commonwealth&#8217;s Attorney&#8217;s office as a drive-thru where repeat offenders pick up their dropped charges and head out the back door.
I have spent four sessions in the General Assembly working to undo the damage this approach has caused the Commonwealth. The progressive prosecutor model that Descano represents, bankrolled by Soros-aligned money and dressed up as reform, has produced exactly what its critics predicted. And the data is readily available to back up these claims.
A Commonwealth&#8217;s Attorney swears an oath to enforce the law. Not to edit it. Not to apologize for it. Not to scrub it off a website when Congress comes calling. The voters of Fairfax County will get their say in 2027. The rest of Virginia should not have to wait.
Virginians have heard enough campaign statements. Time to enforce the law.
***
Del. Wren Williams represents Virginia&#8217;s 47th District in the House of Delegates and serves as a member of the Virginia Crime Commission. He sits on the House Courts of Justice Committee and its Criminal Subcommittee.

Albany Times Union

The County D.A. Handing Out Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Cards

DW Opinion

Steve Descano

In March, a criminal illegal alien stabbed Stephanie Minter to death at a bus stop. Last week, her mother gave a strong and <a href="https://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/fairfax-county-virginia-dangerous-consequences-sanctuary-policies">courageous testimony</a> on Capitol Hill, speaking about her daughter’s fierce faith in God, vibrant smile, and love for family. Sitting to her left was the man whose pro-criminal policies led to Stephanie’s death: Soros-backed Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano.
Stephanie’s alleged murderer, Abdul Jalloh, was a known, repeat, violent offender. In fact, the Fairfax County Police Department had warned Descano’s office about this man multiple times. Over the years, Jalloh had been charged with numerous crimes, including malicious wounding, aggravated assault, and rape. Yet, Descano’s office had dropped <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fairfax-county-prosecutor-facing-congressional-scrutiny-claims-he-doesnt-give-illegal-immigrants-preferential-treatment/">more than half</a> of Jalloh’s criminal charges, ignored warnings from police, and let him loose in the community.
This woke, radical ignorance caused Stephanie’s death earlier this year. Her horrific murder was senseless, tragic, and entirely preventable. Had Fairfax County government officials prioritized the safety of innocent Americans over criminals and illegal aliens, Stephanie may still be alive today.
Sadly, Stephanie is only the latest victim of radical policies enforced by pro-criminal prosecutors. Descano’s deliberate moves to decarcerate and under-prosecute criminals are part of a nationwide, left-wing effort to remake America’s criminal justice system by installing pro-criminal, anti-cop prosecutors bankrolled by billionaire George Soros.
Over the last decade, the Soros strategy has elected more than a hundred radical prosecutors across America. For Soros and his cronies, buying law enforcement officials who refuse to enforce the law is a cost-effective strategy. After all, it’s a whole lot cheaper to back local prosecutorial races than multi-billion-dollar presidential campaigns or multi-million-dollar gubernatorial elections.
I have witnessed Soros and his entities try to infiltrate Arkansas, and I’ve worked hard to keep them out. If a Soros prosecutor took office in my state, it would have jeopardized the safety of Arkansas communities and put Arkansans in harm’s way.
Every Soros-backed victory is a win for criminals and a blow to their victims. From New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between, Soros prosecutors have gone above and beyond to coddle violent, career criminals, cut sweetheart plea deals, and circumvent the law on the books. By 2024, at least <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/democratic-socialists-of-america-george-soros-local-elections">30 percent</a> of Americans lived in a Soros-backed prosecutor’s jurisdiction. And these communities have fared about as you would expect.
In Chicago, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx was Soros’s first big win. She refused to prosecute thefts valued at less than one thousand dollars, oversaw a surge in violent crime, and had more than five thousand homicides occur on her watch. Also consider Baltimore, where State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby — who called the criminal-justice system racist, denounced the police, and refused to prosecute drug traffickers — watched as murders jumped past 300 during her first year in office, and every year after that. Two years after voters turned her out, she was convicted of perjury and filing a false mortgage application.
And then of course, there was District Attorney Rachael Rollins in Boston, who went as far as to publish a list of 15 crimes she wouldn’t prosecute, including drug trafficking, resisting arrest, and malicious destruction of property. When Joe Biden elevated her to U.S. Attorney, every single Democrat in the Senate voted to confirm her, including Kamala Harris, who cast the tie-breaking vote. She resigned from office barely a year later, after the Department of Justice found her guilty of leaking sensitive information, meddling in local politics, and violating laws and ethics regulations. It makes sense why Rollins went to such lengths to protect criminals: she was one.
How many more American lives must be sacrificed to woke justice? How many more mothers like Stephanie Minter’s must grieve the loss of their sons and daughters?
It’s time to defeat every single Soros prosecutor. While some have already been held accountable by voters, every last one of them — including Descano — must be recalled, removed, and replaced with prosecutors who will uphold the rule of law and keep Americans safe.
***
Senator Tom Cotton represents the State of Arkansas.

George Soros

Tom Cotton: Every Soros Prosecutor Endangers American Lives

Eighty days. That is how long Fairfax’s chief prosecutor took to speak with the mother of Stephanie Minter, the 41-year-old woman murdered at a bus stop in late February by a repeat violent offender and illegal alien.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano waited until the cameras were rolling at a House Judiciary hearing investigating the role his policies and practices may have played in Stephanie’s death. He could have called. He didn’t. He could have visited. He didn’t. Descano even avoided the opportunity to meet Cheryl and Stephanie’s brother, Ashton, in private immediately before the hearing. Instead of waiting in the anteroom reserved for him adjacent to Cheryl’s, Descano hid in the Democratic committee offices. When he did emerge minutes before the hearing, he <a href="https://x.com/NickMinock/status/2054930429031964843">walked right behind</a> Cheryl. He didn’t stop. He averted his eyes, then tapped former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares on the back and shook his hand.
I know because I was there, seated next to Cheryl Minter at the witness table.
He then delivered his opening statement full of crocodile tears but no mea culpa for having allowed Stephanie’s killer, Abdul Jalloh, to go free time after time. Under Descano’s watch, Jalloh had been arrested more than 30 times, faced more than 40 charges, including five separate malicious-wounding charges (Virginia’s equivalent of attempted murder) from 2023 to 2025.
In November 2025, police <a href="https://www.fox5dc.com/news/fairfax-police-warned-prosecutors-about-repeat-offender-months-before-deadly-bus-stop-stabbing">warned</a> Descano’s top deputy that Jalloh would “maliciously wound (or worse)” someone again if prosecutors let him go free. They did. He killed Stephanie three months later.
The House Judiciary committee’s hearing last week focused largely on the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney’s “immigration consequences” policy, which directs line prosecutors to “consider immigration consequences where possible and where doing so accords with justice [and] … the detrimental impact that deportation/removal has on the families and communities those removed or deported leave behind.”
That policy clearly suggests that illegal immigrants or any deportable alien earns preferential treatment under Descano’s “<a href="https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/commonwealthattorney/plea-bargaining-charging-decisions-and-sentencing-policy">Plea Bargaining, Charging Decisions, and Sentencing Policy</a>” guidelines promulgated in December 2020, the year he took office.
But under questioning from GOP committee members, Descano repeatedly disputed that, pointing (albeit inarticulately) to the last lines of his policy: “[t]he resolution will be different in a way that avoids or lessens collateral immigration consequences, but will not be better than a resolution offered to a defendant that does not face such collateral issues.”
Different but the same. Got it.
In a heated exchange, House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan interrogated Descano about <a href="https://www.acluva.org/ray-morrogh-and-steve-descanos-responses-aclu-vas-questionnaire-criminal-justice-reform/">prior pledges</a> to discriminate in favor of criminal alien defendants. Notably, Jordan waived a printout of Descano’s <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260310203213/https:/stevedescano.com/community">campaign website </a>(which he deleted before the hearing) that declared “Steve’s office will take immigration consequences into account when making charging and plea decisions … If two people commit the same crime, but only one’s punishment includes deportation, that’s a perversion of justice and not a reflection of the values of Fairfax County.”
The same but different. Again.
Here, Descano withered under Jordan’s questioning, trying to distinguish his campaign promises from his official policies, saying he couldn’t “believe people would be so obtuse that they couldn’t realize what the difference was between a campaign statement and an actual office policy.”
For Fairfax’s chief prosecutor, it went downhill from there. A few of the committee’s Democrats ceded their time to Descano to better explain himself, instead preferring to lean in on anti-ICE rhetoric and their witnesses’ generic pro-illegal immigration arguments.
One theme that emerged as a counternarrative was that Fairfax was the “safest county of its size in the United States.”
Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal also asked Descano if the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) rated Fairfax County “among the safest jurisdictions of its size.” Descano gleefully concurred. Reps. Jamie Raskin and Jerrold Nadler repeated the claim.
But they all omitted the alarming trend that the same <a href="https://majorcitieschiefs.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MCCA-Violent-Crime-Report-2026-and-2025-First-Quarter.pdf">data</a> actually shows violent crime has skyrocketed since Steve Descano became Fairfax’s chief prosecutor and hasn’t fallen even as it has plummeted elsewhere.
Overall, Fairfax County&#8217;s violent crime — murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — was up 92% in 2025 compared with 2019. Meanwhile, “<a href="https://www.fcpod.org/pages/crime-data">crimes against persons</a>,” which includes all violent crimes, sex offenses, and simple assaults, rose 27% according to the Fairfax County Police Department.
So, Fairfax is less safe since Descano became its prosecutor. Meanwhile, in nearby Montgomery County, Maryland, which is almost exactly the same size as Fairfax but has a tough-on-crime prosecutor in Democrat John McCarthy, the <a href="https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/montgomery-county-police-department/public-safety-data/annual-crime-safety-reports">crime rate </a>has fallen below that of <a href="https://wjla.com/news/local/why-is-montgomery-countys-violent-crime-rate-twice-as-high-as-fairfax-countys">famously safe</a> <a href="https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/03bcc658f4f44662ab70308157c31d0e">Fairfax County</a> for both property and person crimes.
Similarly sized Suffolk County, New York (which does cooperate with ICE) has also seen crime drop during the period.
But those abstract figures distract from the deeply personal human tragedy that Descano’s policies have wrought. By shielding criminal aliens from “immigration consequences,” hundreds, if not thousands, of violent and sex crimes could have been prevented, including over a dozen murders.
In addition to extending extreme leniency to Abdul Jalloh, Descano freed Marvin Morales-Ortez, who was previously arrested for murder years before, and released him after dropping charges for malicious wounding and brandishing a firearm in December 2025. Within 24 hours, Ortez allegedly killed a man in Reston. Or Maldin Anibal Guzman, who, despite being arrested nine times, including for at least two prior attempted murders, was freed to kill a man behind a convenience store in 2024. Just last month, Guzman received only five years for that killing.
In all three cases (Jalloh, Ortez, and Guzman), Descano offered the same excuse: witness noncooperation or unavailability. It is never Mr. Descano’s fault, you see. Except in the Jalloh cases, he was caught red-handed lying to the media. In at least two of Jalloh’s prior attempted murders, Fairfax prosecutors never even bothered to <a href="https://wjla.com/newsletter-daily/descano-says-victims-wouldnt-aid-abdul-jalloh-prosecution-heres-what-we-found-illegal-immigrant-fairfax-county-commonwealths-attorney-steve-descano-testimony">subpoena</a> the witnesses.
And Descano’s pattern of lying was on full display at the hearing when he attempted to rebut multiple members who questioned him about the illegal alien pedophile Hyrum Baquedano Rodriguez’s case (my detailed testimony is <a href="https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/2026-05/Kennedy-Testimony.pdf">here</a>).
Descano tried to plea out the would-be kidnapper and rapist of a four-year-old to a maximum of two years, who potentially faced life in prison, saying he “did not have strong evidence.” Two separate judges rejected the plea as too lenient. In a fit, Descano dropped the charges altogether, and Baquedano-Rodriguez, who had an extensive history of child sex crimes, would have walked free if the girl’s grandmother had not herself called ICE to pick him up. He has since been deported — no thanks to Mr. Descano’s policy of thwarting “immigration consequences.”
As damning as the hearing was for Mr. Descano, his implied defense that he engages in unlawful discrimination based on immigration status is persuasive, if unsettling: Fairfax’s chief prosecutor is not soft on dangerous criminal aliens — he is equally lenient toward violent repeat offenders of all backgrounds.
The Department of Justice has launched an investigation to find out the truth. Whatever DOJ finds, one thing is already clear: Fairfax County victims are being re-victimized by the man entrusted with protecting them.
***
Sean Kennedy is the president of Virginians for Safe Communities, a nonprofit public safety and victims’ rights advocacy group, and a member of the Fairfax County Criminal Justice Advisory Board. He testified alongside Descano at the May 14, 2026, hearing on Fairfax County’s Sanctuary policies.

Fairfax County, Virginia: The Dangerous Consequences of Sanctuary Policies

My Front Row Seat To The Soros DA Letting Criminals Walk Free

Fairfax County

It&#8217;s becoming a weekly ritual: California&#8217;s First Lady opens her mouth, inserts her foot, and the rest of the country winces.
In a resurfaced interview, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-gavin-newsoms-wife-bizarrely-attempt-to-relate-to-prisoners">Jennifer</a> Siebel Newsom recounts telling prisoners at San Quentin State Prison that she could relate to them. Why? Because at age six, she accidentally struck and killed her eight-year-old sister with a golf cart during a family vacation in Hawaii. She wasn&#8217;t punished, she explained, because it was clearly an accident, and she wanted those inmates to know their crimes were &#8220;probably an accident too.&#8221;
To call that comparison a stretch would be the understatement of the century.
Here&#8217;s the silver lining: if she keeps this up, she will single-handedly torch whatever remains of Gavin Newsom&#8217;s presidential ambitions. But there&#8217;s a larger point that cannot be glossed over. Democrats have long acted like they care more about criminals than their victims. Now they&#8217;re just saying the quiet part out loud.
The <a href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/02/20/governor-newsom-transforms-san-quentin-opens-nation-leading-learning-center/">prison</a> known as &#8220;The Q&#8221; has become the Newsoms&#8217; progressive playground. The couple has poured millions into rebranding the facility as a &#8220;rehabilitation center&#8221; for wayward souls, even though the vast majority of its 3,500 to 4,000 inmates are Level II and Level IV prisoners with rap sheets containing murder, assault, armed robbery, and rape. This is the same prison that once housed the largest death row in America — until Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions in 2019. At least <a href="https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/twenty-years-since-last-execution-california-remains-under-execution-moratorium-as-advocates-push-for-mass-clemency-grant">650</a> condemned inmates were then quietly integrated into the general population. Empathy, apparently, has no room for such inconvenient details.
And who exactly are these &#8220;wronged individuals&#8221; the Newsoms are so eager to coddle? <a href="https://www.modbee.com/news/local/crime/scott-peterson-case/article267796397.html">Scott</a> Peterson, who murdered his pregnant wife Laci and their unborn son Connor, and <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/polly-klaas-killer-richard-allen-davis-seeks-death-sentence-overturned/#:~:text=Crime-,Judge%20to%20mull%20overturning%20Polly%20Klaas%20killer%20Richard%20Allen%20Davis,governor%20could%20change%20that%20policy.">Richard</a> Allen Davis, who kidnapped and strangled 12-year-old Polly <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/25/us/scott-peterson-off-death-row">Klaas</a>, for starters. The prison has also held Charles Manson, Robert F. Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan, and a rogues&#8217; gallery of serial killers. But still — ‘accidents happen’ the First Partner assures us! The bleeding-heart Newsoms just feel too strongly for these poor souls. They want to ease their sentences and — one suspects eventually — set them free.
This is not an isolated gaffe. Progressives are increasingly defending the perpetrator over the victim, and they&#8217;re doing it with brazen clarity. Remember the State of the Union, when Democrats refused to stand for the simple proposition: &#8220;The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens. If you agree with this statement, stand up and show your support.&#8221;
That moment crystallized the divide. Democrats care about &#8220;them,&#8221; not you. It doesn&#8217;t matter that 18-year-old Sheridan Gorman was allegedly murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, or that 15-year-old Amber Paris was allegedly killed by a Guatemalan illegal immigrant speeding through North Carolina, or that 7-year-old Delilah Coleman will never walk again after an illegal immigrant from India crashed into her family&#8217;s car. The progressive catechism demands solidarity with the &#8220;oppressed&#8221; (i.e., criminal) over the &#8220;oppressor&#8221; — no matter the facts.
Despite a $3 billion state deficit in the 2026-27 budget and a total price tag for the &#8220;California Model&#8221; prison overhaul now reaching $14.2 billion, the Newsom administration carved out $78.5 million specifically for San Quentin&#8217;s physical makeover into a feel-good &#8220;rehabilitation center.&#8221; Compare that architectural largesse to the relative crumbs tossed at victim-services programs in the neighborhoods these criminals terrorized.
Violent crime in California remains nearly 10 percent higher than pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Aggravated assaults are still roughly 22 percent higher. The state&#8217;s overall recidivism rate hovers between 45 and 50 percent, even as boutique programs brag about single-digit success stories for a tiny slice of participants. This is an expensive experiment with other people&#8217;s safety.
Which brings us back to Jennifer Siebel Newsom and the story she told those inmates.
She was six years old, playing with her eight-year-old sister Stacey and other children on golf carts during a family vacation in Hawaii in 1981. The cart she was driving slipped into reverse. She did not see her sister behind it. The tragedy that followed was, by any measure, a genuine accident — the kind of event that would leave any child scarred.
&#8220;I felt the pressure to be perfect,&#8221; she later told the Los Angeles Times, &#8220;to make my parents forget, by being two daughters instead of one.&#8221; She described the survivor&#8217;s guilt, the compulsion to compensate, to improve other people&#8217;s lives, to do double the good. It’s no wonder she’s the way she is.
But sympathy does not require the eradication of judgment. The men Jennifer Siebel Newsom addressed at San Quentin were not involved in golf cart accidents. They were convicted killers, rapists, and predators. Projecting her childhood trauma onto their deliberate acts of violence is not empathy. It is a category error with consequences, and those consequences are carried not by the Newsoms but by the families of Laci Peterson, Polly Klaas, and every other victim whose killer now enjoys a governor&#8217;s reprieve and a First “Partner’s” suicidal empathy.
Soft on crime, hard on victims: If this is the compassion the progressive left wants to export to the rest of America, voters would be wise to decline the invitation. Some accidents, after all, are entirely avoidable.

Governor Gavin Newsom is set to be inaugurated for a second term on Friday, Jan. 6, and the preparations for the ceremony are underway in downtown Sacramento.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom Knows Exactly How Murderers Feel

California

Crime

Illegal Immigation

Jennifer Newsom

Prisons

This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars.
***
Earlier this week, the New York Times editorial board <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/opinion/trump-jan-6-pardons-crimes-recidivism.html">declared</a> with great alarm that “The People Trump Pardoned Are on a Crime Spree.” President Donald Trump has issued many pardons and grants of clemency, as have his predecessors. The worst of these decisions, says the board, was Trump’s grant of “clemency on the first day of his second term to everyone who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.” That clemency was extended to approximately 1,500 participants in the infamous riot universally known by the date on which it occurred: January 6. Whether it was wise to issue a mass clemency to the rioters is a debatable proposition, but whether those rioters have since gone on a crime spree is an empirical question with a clear answer: Not even close.
The Times’ editorial tells readers that the results of the clemency “have been disastrous.” Big, if true! But the claim doesn’t hold up under even modest scrutiny. Here is what the board considers damning evidence: “At least 12 of the pardoned rioters have since been charged with other serious crimes, including child molestation, assault, harassment, murder plots and charges related to a vicious dog attack.”
Twelve, you say!?
“Disastrous” is about as dishonest a characterization for a recidivism rate of less than 1% as one can imagine. For context, national data show that more than 80% of released state prisoners — most of whom are released (typically after less than two years) onto parole after serving an average of about 44% of their maximum sentence, despite having around 10 prior arrests and five prior convictions — in America are rearrested for a new crime. On average, state prison releasees will generate five new rearrests over a 10-year period. Now, who would bet on the Times running an editorial decrying the practice of early parole, or calling for longer sentences? I certainly wouldn’t.
In fact, the same editorial board has a long history of dedicating page space to those pushing a decades-long effort to decarcerate and de-police. Over the years, the Times has said very little about the recidivism issue, but has had plenty to say in supporting efforts to be more lenient with offenders and tougher on police. That long record of both implicit and explicit support for criminal justice and police reforms that enabled a significant amount of reoffending — exactly the kind the Times now criticizes — makes this week’s editorial impossible to take seriously, especially the part calling for an electoral referendum on public safety.
Where were those calls when Democrats across the country were defunding their local police departments, pushing to release more and more repeat criminal offenders, and breathlessly celebrating prosecutors who ran on diverting as many criminal offenders as they felt they could politically get away with releasing?
The question is, of course, rhetorical. No one actually believes that the New York Times’s editorial board has suddenly connected with its inner carceralist. The editorial is transparently cynical and flagrantly hypocritical.
Republicans have traditionally held an advantage over Democrats in public opinion regarding which party is more effective on public safety. President Trump has made “law and order” a central theme of his presidency. Less than two weeks ago, he presided over a roundtable discussion on crime in Memphis, TN, where his administration deployed a U.S. Marshals-led task force comprising federal law enforcement agencies, local police, and the National Guard. The administration has been <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/03/president-trumps-memphis-safe-task-force-delivers-crushing-blow-to-crime/">enthusiastically touting</a> the success of the task force, to which it has attributed a steep decline in crime in what has long been one of America’s most dangerous cities.
Facilitating a 1,500-person crime spree would constitute a major political liability for any president — but it would be an especially bad look for this president. But the New York Times is grasping at straws here, and if it wants the public to take its newfound concern for the problem of repeat offending seriously, it should consider speaking up about any one of the countless examples of that problem plaguing Democrat-run cities across America.
***
Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a contributing editor of City Journal, and author of the 2022 book, Criminal (In)Justice.

Sign at the entrance to the New York Times Headquarters in

The New York Times Finally Discovers That Criminals Commit Crime

Crime stats

January 6

New York Times

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Career Criminal Freed By Radical Pro-Crime Judge Sets Christian Woman On Fire On Subway

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By all accounts — including his own — 36-year-old roofer Joe Gonzales was an evil human being who deserved to die. In 1992, in the state of Texas, Gonzales murdered a 50-year-old building contractor who supposedly owed him $200. Gonzales robbed the man and attempted to make his death look like a suicide. But it wasn&#8217;t a very convincing defense, because people who kill themselves normally don&#8217;t rob themselves after they do it. At trial, Gonzales told the jury, “I am a man who has no regard for the law. I am a man who has no regard for humanity.&#8221;
Within just twelve minutes, in November of 1995, the jury <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/19/us/on-death-row-10-months-man-is-executed.html">convicted</a> Gonzales and recommended the death penalty.
If you had to guess how long it took Joe Gonzales to actually be put to death, what would you say? What&#8217;s the approximate timeframe for how long you think Joe Gonzales sat on death row, before he was finally executed?
Maybe you&#8217;re thinking this is a trick question, and that the answer is: He was never actually executed, he&#8217;s still on death row, appealing the jury&#8217;s decision, to this day. That&#8217;s normally how death penalty cases go. We all know that. But in this case, surprisingly enough, Joe Gonzales was indeed put to death. And he was put to death very quickly, relatively speaking. Just ten months after the jury recommended the death penalty, in September of 1996, Joe Gonzales was executed by lethal injection. It was the fastest execution in U.S. history since Gary Gilmore was executed in Utah in 1977 by firing squad, just three months after he was convicted of two murders.
The reason both of these men were executed so quickly is that, unlike most death penalty defendants, they weren&#8217;t interested in dragging the process out. They didn&#8217;t have any interest in appealing their sentences. So they allowed the government to proceed with the executions, without undue delay. And the government obliged. Left to their own devices, without any frivolous appeals, states like Texas and Utah were able to dispense justice in a reasonable timeframe.
This is not ancient history. We&#8217;re not talking about executions in colonial New England, or anything like that. In modern America, it&#8217;s entirely possible to put violent criminals to death, promptly. One of the key steps we need to take, as these cases demonstrate, is to get rid of the idea that death penalty defendants are entitled to an automatic appeal. These appeals can take decades to resolve. They&#8217;re almost always unnecessary.
But ever since the 1970s, because of a Supreme Court decision, these appeals have been mandatory (unless the defendant waives them). As a result of this decision by the Supreme Court, the average time that inmates spend on death row has ballooned.
<div id="attachment_989217" style="width: 799px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-989217" class="wp-image-989217 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Chart-Death-Row-789x576.jpg" alt="Source: Death Penalty Information Center" width="789" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Chart-Death-Row-789x576.jpg 789w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Chart-Death-Row-300x219.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Chart-Death-Row-768x560.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Chart-Death-Row-1360x994.jpg 1360w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Chart-Death-Row.jpg 1362w" sizes=" (max-width: 789px) 100vw, 789px" />Source: Death Penalty Information Center</div>
In the 1980s, as you can see here, the average time spent on death row was around 74 months. Now it&#8217;s over 260.
So it didn&#8217;t take long, after the Supreme Court&#8217;s decision in 1976, for everything to slow down. They introduced mandatory appeals, and now inmates are spending three times as long on death row.
<div id="attachment_989223" style="width: 779px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-989223" class="wp-image-989223 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Death-Penalty-age-769x576.jpg" alt="Source: Death Penalty Information Center" width="769" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Death-Penalty-age-769x576.jpg 769w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Death-Penalty-age-300x225.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Death-Penalty-age-768x575.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Death-Penalty-age.jpg 1370w" sizes=" (max-width: 769px) 100vw, 769px" />Source: Death Penalty Information Center</div>
Along the same lines, as you&#8217;d expect, there&#8217;s also been a dramatic change in the average age of a defendant who&#8217;s executed on death row. In 1975, the average age was 36. In 1980, the average age was 24.
By 2005, the average age was up to 44. Now it&#8217;s over 50. In fact, more than 570 prisoners on death row are over the age of 60, as of 2019. Back in 1996, that number was just 39.
Some elderly prisoners — like Vernon Madison in Alabama — are spending so much time on death row that they&#8217;re developing dementia and having strokes, which makes them ineligible for the death penalty because they&#8217;re supposedly &#8220;incompetent to be executed.&#8221; Yes, that&#8217;s an actual category of inmate. You might argue that competence is kind of irrelevant for the death penalty. You don’t need to be competent. You don’t need to do anything but die. But this is the system we have now. Even if you were competent to stand trial, it&#8217;s possible for you to lose your mind on death row. And then you go back to general population, as a confused vegetable, while the victim&#8217;s family wonders when they&#8217;re going to get the justice they were promised. This is supposedly the &#8220;humane&#8221; solution, according to the Supreme Court. We need an absurd amount of appeals and bureaucratic wrangling, lasting years and years, before we can actually execute anyone.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1677-have-you-forgotten-about-iryna-zarutska-they-want-you-to-here-s-why"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-976065 aligncenter" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Matt-watch-now-1-1024x171.jpg" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Matt-watch-now-1-1024x171.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Matt-watch-now-1-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Matt-watch-now-1-768x128.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Matt-watch-now-1-1536x256.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Matt-watch-now-1.jpg 1800w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Keep in mind, the Supreme Court made this decision in an era before advanced DNA evidence, modern ballistics techniques, or widespread video surveillance. The general sentiment, at the time, was that innocent people might be convicted and sent to death row. So therefore, because evidence wasn&#8217;t robust, we supposedly needed mandatory appeals, to make sure that innocent people weren&#8217;t executed.
But that&#8217;s not the case any more.
Most death penalty cases are similar to the murder of Iryna Zarutska.
It’s an important case, even amid all of the other things happening in the country. And we cannot forget what happened to her.
That’s why I want to give a brief update on the case and tell you what’s going on with it now. The answer, as we’ll see, is that nothing is going on. There is no update. No movement at all. And that’s the point.
Now, of course, there is no doubt whatsoever as to who is responsible for Iryna&#8217;s death. The killer in this case has more than a dozen prior arrests. He committed the crime on camera, as we all remember. In a just society, the man responsible — Decarlos Brown Jr. — would be given a speedy trial, under our Constitution, and then put to death.
That&#8217;s true even if you buy his defense, which is that he was &#8220;mentally ill&#8221; in some way. But really, the defense is nonsense. This is a surveillance photo from the light rail, a second or so after he stabbed and mortally wounded Iryna. It&#8217;s the photo you&#8217;ve probably seen many times before.
<div id="attachment_989213" style="width: 585px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-989213" class="size-large wp-image-989213" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Char2-575x576.jpg" alt="Screenshot: Surveillance video, Charlotte Area Transit System" width="575" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Char2-575x576.jpg 575w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Char2-300x300.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Char2-150x150.jpg 150w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Char2-768x769.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/Char2.jpg 1070w" sizes=" (max-width: 575px) 100vw, 575px" />Screenshot: Surveillance video, Charlotte Area Transit System</div>
It&#8217;s obvious that Decarlos Brown went out of his way to target a defenseless woman who wasn&#8217;t even looking at him. He sat in wait for his victim. After he killed her, he said something along the lines of, &#8220;I got that white girl.&#8221; And then, as this surveillance footage from the train station, which was just released, demonstrates, he changed his clothing.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Watch: Video shows Iryna Zarutska’s accused killer being arrested at Charlotte light rail station" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GcCtpUL9hrs?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Credit: WBTV News/Charlotte/YouTube.com
This is the footage of the arrest of Decarlos Brown. The officers swarm him pretty quickly. But as you can see, he&#8217;s not wearing the red clothing anymore. He&#8217;s carrying his sweatshirt. So it looks a lot like he understood that he had just killed someone, and wanted to avoid detection.
Whether he &#8220;heard voices&#8221; or not, or whether he has &#8220;impulse control issues&#8221; or not, it doesn&#8217;t matter. Someone who decides to murder an innocent woman, for any reason, forfeits his right to live. And that&#8217;s clearly what happened here.
But because our death penalty system is a bureaucratic morass, Decarlos Brown will not be executed anytime soon.
This is the latest reporting from a <a href="https://www.wbtv.com/2025/10/15/hearing-determine-if-north-carolina-will-pursue-death-penalty-alleged-light-rail-killer-delayed/">local news station</a> in North Carolina. Here’s what’s happening with his case right now.
<blockquote>The man accused of killing a Ukrainian woman on a Charlotte light rail almost two months ago was scheduled to have a crucial court hearing on Thursday. Decarlos Brown Jr., the man accused of killing 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska back in late August, was scheduled to have a Rule 24 court hearing on Thursday, Oct. 16. A Rule 24 hearing is for the state to determine whether or not they would pursue the death penalty. Court documents said that the hearing has now been pushed back until April 2026. The decision to delay the hearing came from Brown and his attorney, Daniel Roberts. However, the reason for the delay was redacted, according to court documents.</blockquote>
So there&#8217;s going to be a &#8220;hearing&#8221; to &#8220;determine whether or not&#8221; the state will &#8220;pursue the death penalty&#8221; — as if there&#8217;s any doubt that they should. Decarlos Brown should&#8217;ve been put down somewhere after his 10th conviction. And he certainly should be executed now. But this hearing won&#8217;t take place until April of next year.
Of course, the best part of all is that you don&#8217;t even get to know why the hearing was delayed. You get no information whatsoever. All you can be sure of, at this point, is that the trial isn&#8217;t going to take place for a very long time — if it occurs at all. Even in a case where the defendant&#8217;s guilt is obvious to everyone in the entire country, we&#8217;re told to put up with endless delays, for no reason.
These delays are downstream from that Supreme Court decision in the 1970s. And that Supreme Court decision was downstream of the belief — which is false — that innocent defendants are sent to death row all the time. That wasn&#8217;t true in the 1970s. And it&#8217;s certainly not true anymore. We don&#8217;t need a neurotic number of hearings and appeals to determine the fate of animals like Decarlos Brown. The evidence is overwhelming. And it&#8217;s overwhelming in every other death row case, as well.
So why haven&#8217;t any states attempted to bypass this Supreme Court decision, with lawsuits or new legislation? Why haven&#8217;t we seen legal challenges to this absurd framework that essentially renders the death penalty moot? Why don&#8217;t states say, actually, we don&#8217;t need mandatory appeals anymore, or endless hearings. We can just hold a trial, present the overwhelming evidence, and then get on with the execution. There&#8217;s certainly no constitutional basis for making the death penalty effectively impossible to enforce. On the contrary, the Founders approved of the death penalty — explicitly, in many cases. So why don&#8217;t we see any legal challenges on this point?
The only explanation that makes sense is that — in the case of Decarlos Brown, and every other case like his — the people in charge of the state government want us to forget what happened. They want the outrage to subside, which it usually does. And then they can get away with giving as lenient a sentence as possible. That&#8217;s what the mayor of Charlotte clearly wants. Remember, she put out a statement saying we should feel sympathy for people like Decarlos Brown, and attacked anyone who shared the footage of Iryna&#8217;s murder. She doesn&#8217;t want Decarlos Brown to be executed. If she can arrange it, she wants him out on the streets, as soon as possible, so he can terrorize more innocent women.
And it&#8217;s not crazy to think the mayor of Charlotte might accomplish that goal. Just a week ago, we covered the case of a convicted child killer who managed to get out of prison in less than a decade. Fortunately, in the case of Decarlos Brown, there are federal charges as well — and those charges are also death-eligible. But that prosecution — and any potential conviction — could be undone by a future Democrat administration. And at this point, particularly if Decarlos Brown isn&#8217;t executed, that outcome seems like a distinct possibility. But it shouldn&#8217;t be possible. The right to a speedy trial doesn&#8217;t just apply for the benefit of the defendant. It also applies for the benefit of society at large. We have a constitutional right to see violent criminals punished, swiftly, to the fullest extent of the law.
Every once in a while, over the past month or so, I&#8217;ve come across a post on X with that picture of Iryna, along with a message like &#8220;We haven&#8217;t forgotten you,&#8221; or something along those lines. I hope that&#8217;s true. But as months turn into years, inevitably, people will become distracted. There will be more violence and chaos and tragedy — Democrats will make sure of that. And it will be easy, despite our best efforts, to forget what happened to Iryna. That&#8217;s what they want us to do. That was the whole point of the Supreme Court&#8217;s decision in the 1970s, and all the state laws that followed. Now&#8217;s the time for those laws to change. And it&#8217;s time for Iryna Zarutska&#8217;s killer to receive a fair trial, and then a speedy execution in a matter of weeks, if not days — which is, admittedly, a far more dignified death than he deserves. But under our Constitution and our common law tradition on the death penalty, which has been ignored since the 1970s, it&#8217;s the fate that Decarlos Brown should receive.
* * *
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Have You Forgotten About Iryna Zarutska? They Want You To. Here’s Why. 

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The Case Of The Child Killer Released From Prison Just Got Even More Insane

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