“A gunman who killed three and wounded five others at Michigan State University on Monday would have been barred from owning a firearm at the time of the shooting had he not had felony gun charges dismissed by a progressive prosecutor,” reports the Washington Free Beacon.
Anthony McRae was charged in 2019 with unlawfully carrying a concealed handgun without a permit, but those charges were later dismissed by the office of Ingham County prosecutor Carol Siemon (D). Her office instead let McRae plead guilty to a minor misdemeanor gun charge, and as a result, he served a little more than a year on probation, which ended in 2021. He would have faced up to five years in prison for the felony charge, according to the Detroit News. As the Free Beacon notes:
Siemon retired from the prosecutor’s office at the start of this year after facing criticism from judges and law enforcement officials for her soft-on-crime policies. The same year that McRae was released, Ingham County sheriff Scott Wriggelsworth pushed East Lansing’s city council “to reconsider her internal felony firearm charging policy,” which he said “does not hold people properly criminally accountable, and increases the likelihood of additional gun violence.”
Siemon made it her office’s official policy in August 2021 to drop mandatory prison sentences for felony firearms charges. She said the sentencing enhancement led to “dramatic racial inequity…” Siemon is part of George Soros’s vast [criminal justice] network. She has participated in international criminal justice reform junkets with other “reform-minded” prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner (D.), Chicago’s Kim Foxx (D.), and Los Angeles’s George Gascón. She also backed radical San Francisco prosecutor Chesa Boudin (D.) ahead of a recall campaign that eventually ousted him from office last year.
Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, says that “progressive prosecutors such as Ms. Siemon continue to value reducing the incarcerated population over their duty to protect the public by enforcing the law.”
In 2021, the Vera Institute for Justice, a progressive think tank funded by George Soros, lauded Siemon and other “reform” prosecutors who pledged to reduce racial disparities in prosecution by adopting soft-on-crime policies. Siemon boasted about the soft-on-crime changes her office had made when she announced her retirement in November.
Others were unhappy about those changes. As the Free Beacon notes,
a Michigan circuit court judge called her out weeks earlier for making Lansing less safe with her policies. “She is not a legislator, she is not a judge, and she is making our community unsafe,” Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said.
Siemon’s successor, John Dewane, has already set about toughening up charges for repeat offenders, according to an interview he did with WKAR. “My number one goal, and I put out some policies with regard to this issue, is the increase in gun violence in our community, specifically the Lansing area,” he said.
Dewane told the Free Beacon after publication that “McRae would not have been able to legally purchase, own, or possess a firearm” if he had “been convicted of carrying a concealed weapon.” Reports show neighbors had called the police on McRae last summer after hearing him fire his gun in the backyard of his father’s home in Lansing.
