Jesse Lee Calhoun “is a suspect in the killings of four of six women found dead earlier this year in the greater Portland metro area,” reports Willamette Week. “Calhoun, 38, is among the more than 1,000 inmates whom former Gov. Kate Brown granted clemency, allowing them to leave prison early.”
Calhoun was released early in July 2021 even though he had “a long record of felony convictions dating to 2004. After arresting him in 2018 with meth, several guns, and more than 500 rounds of ammunition, the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office called him a ‘prolific thief and career criminal.’ Calhoun’s most recent convictions came in November 2019, when he pleaded guilty in separate cases to a raft of felonies, including burglary, unauthorized possession of a stolen vehicle, and injuring a police officer and a police dog when they attempted to arrest him.”
Governor Brown, a Democrat, “earned recognition across the country for her commitment to criminal justice reform, appearing at Princeton University, for example, on a December panel titled ‘Correcting Injustice: How Clemency Serves Justice and Strengthens Communities.'”
Despite a spate of killings committed by recently-released inmates, states keep passing criminal-justice reforms allowing inmates, including murderers, to be released early. New York State’s legislature recently passed an “elder parole” bill, S2423, that will allow inmates convicted of any offense, including serial killers, to be released at age 55 if they have served 15 years in prison. As a result, a recently arrested serial killer will be able to seek parole rather than die in prison.
Last year, a murderer was arrested for killing again at age 83 after two prior murder convictions in New York State. Thus, it’s wrong to claim that inmates swiftly age of out of crime, or that inmates can safely be released just because they have reached a particular age, as supporters of New York’s Elder Parole bill claim.
Advocates of decarceration falsely claim people age out of crime after ten or fifteen years, and thus should be released. The George Soros-funded Law Enforcement Action Partnership claimed to the Virginia legislature that if “people entered prison over a decade ago,” “their continued incarceration does very little, if anything, to maintain safety.” It made that claim in support of a bill, SB 378, that would have allowed inmates to seek release after 10 or 15 years regardless of what crime they had committed. Another supporter of the bill claimed that “people age out of crime by their late thirty’s [sic].”
Returning to crime after being released is typical for inmates, according to a 2022 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. It documented that problem in a 116-page report titled “Recidivism of Federal Violent Offenders Released in 2010.” Over an eight-year period, violent offenders returned to crime at a 63.8% rate. The median time to rearrest was 16 months for these violent offenders. So, most violent offenders released from prison committed more crimes. Even among those offenders over age 60, 25.1% of violent offenders were rearrested for committing new crimes.
There are many examples of killers murdering people yet again after being paroled. One example is Kenneth McDuff, the “broomstick killer.” At the age of 19, after being paroled, McDuff and an accomplice kidnapped three teenagers. He shot and killed two boys, then killed a girl after raping her and torturing her with burns and a broomstick. Later, after being paroled yet again, he murdered additional women — as many as 15 women in several different states.
Many famous serial killers were still active in their 50s. Albert Fish started killing at age 54, and Dorothea Puente started at age 53. Other notorious serial killers were active into their 50s, such as Peter Tobin (up to age 60), John Reginald Christie (up to age 53), and Ted Kaczynski (into his 50s).
Some murderers continue to kill even at an advanced age. At the age of 76, Albert Flick killed a woman, stabbing her at least 11 times while her twin sons watched. He had previously been imprisoned from 1979 to 2004 for killing his wife by stabbing her 14 times in front of her daughter.
Marceline Harvey was arrested for killing again at age 83, after two prior convictions in New York State. Harvey, who gender-transitioned after being released from prison, was arrested after previously spending three decades in prison for killing one girlfriend, and before that, spending twenty years in prison for killing an earlier girlfriend. Twice, Harvey had been paroled and released after deliberately murdering someone.
