“A 36-year-old black man screamed, ‘I want all the white people dead,’ before stabbing two white teenage girls, ages 14 and 16, who were visiting NYC with their parents and eating at a restaurant on Christmas morning. The 16-year-old was stabbed in the back, the knife nicking her lungs. Her younger sister was stabbed in the thigh. ‘Hutcherson was booked on felony counts of attempted murder, assault, criminal possession of a weapon and misdemeanor endangering the welfare of a child, according to the MTA.’ He has not been charged with a hate crime. Prior to the Christmas stabbing, he was last arrested Nov. 7 for threatening to ‘shoot’ a stranger in the Bronx. He was given a plea deal to a lesser offense and released without incarceration. He has 13 prior convictions,” notes attorney Marina Medvin.
The stabber, Hutcherson, was roaming free despite having been previously convicted of 11 serious crimes, and recently been arrested, thanks to leftists like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who let dangerous criminals off time and time again.
The New York Post reports:
A troubled vagrant randomly stabbed two teenage girls enjoying a Christmas morning meal with their parents at a Grand Central Terminal restaurant — after ranting that he wanted “all white people dead,” authorities said.
The girls, 14- and 16-year-olds visiting from South America, were attacked at Tartinery in the Grand Central Dining Concourse around 11:25 a.m. Monday and suffered non-life-threatening stab wounds, police and sources said.
“I want all the white people dead,” the suspect, Steven Hutcherson, 36, allegedly yelled, according to police sources. “I want to sit next to the crackers.”
He then allegedly lunged at the unsuspecting teens, plunging a knife into the 16-year-old’s back, nicking her lungs, and stabbing the younger girl in the thigh, police and a law enforcement source said.
Prior to Monday’s incident, he was last arrested Nov. 7 for allegedly threatening to “shoot” a stranger in the Bronx. “I’m gonna shoot you….Open your mouth and say something. I will shoot you right now.”
He then pulled what the victim believed was a gun “from the side of his pants”… Hutcherson was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, menacing, harassment and assault…He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of third-degree assault, a misdemeanor, and was sentenced Dec. 12 to conditional discharge, the Bronx District Attorney’s Office said.
“They shouldn’t have let him out [of jail]. I don’t believe it,” the victim in that case, Yussif Abdullahi, 46, told The Post on Tuesday.
“DAs are chopping all the charges down. Judges are letting him go,” a law enforcement source added.
“Now we’ve got two teenagers who were stabbed.”
CBS News reports “that the suspect, 36-year-old Stephen Hutcherson, has been arrested 13 times over more than 20 years, with 11 convictions.”
Hutcherson being out of jail and in a position to stab random white people is exactly what happens due to the policy of reducing jail populations — “decarceration” — that is being pushed by the Democratic Party.
They release inmates early, and release offenders without bail, leading to news stories like “22-time convicted felon burglarizes homes while on parole for 19 armed robberies.”
“This is what decarcerationists getting what they want looks like,” notes criminal justice expert Rafael Mangual, who wrote the book, “Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most.”
Yet Democratic legislative leaders continue to boast they they have “led America on decarceration” as if this were a good thing, even in states where crime has increased in 2021 and 2022.
Soft-on-crime policies have increased violent crime and theft in many big cities. The Free Beacon reported last month that there had been “863 carjacking incidents in Washington, D.C., this year. That’s a 106 percent increase compared with last year and a 600 percent increase compared with 2019. Nearly three in four carjacking incidents in 2023 involved a firearm, and the majority of individuals arrested were juveniles.” Killings have also skyrocketed in Washington, DC, up 36% this year to 267 killings.
Cities could slash their crime rate and save lives by imprisoning more criminals. When El Salvador increased its incarceration rate, its murder rate fell by more than 90%. Jailing more criminals saved thousands of lives in El Salvador.
Judges and progressive prosecutors refuse to jail many offenders because of the myth of “mass incarceration.” But as criminology professor Justin Nix notes, “Given its level of serious crime, America has ordinary levels of incarceration but extraordinary levels of under-policing.”
Even a decade ago, when the criminal justice system was tougher on criminals than it is today, the criminal justice system was already quite lenient on most offenders. As the Wall Street Journal noted back then:
Far from being prison-happy, the criminal-justice system tries to divert as many people as possible from long-term confinement. “Most cases are triaged with deferred judgments, deferred sentences, probation, workender jail sentences, weekender jail sentences,” writes Iowa State University sociologist Matt DeLisi in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice.
Offenders given community alternatives “are afforded multiple opportunities to violate these sanctions only to receive additional conditions, additional months on their sentence, or often, no additional punishments at all,” Mr. DeLisi adds. In 2009, 27% of convicted felons in the 75 largest counties received a community sentence of probation or treatment, and 37% were sentenced not to prison but to jail, where sentences top out at one year but are usually completed in a few weeks or months. Only 36% of convicted felons in 2009 got a prison term.
Longer prison sentences also deter violent crimes and theft by people who are not currently incarcerated. Crime in California fell significantly after California voters adopted Proposition 8, which mandated longer sentences for repeat offenders who kill, rape, and rob others. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found those longer sentences deterred many crimes from being committed. As it observed, three years after Proposition 8 was adopted, crimes punished with enhanced sentences had “fallen roughly 20-40 percent compared to” crimes not covered by enhanced sentences. Similarly, a 2008 Santa Clara University study found that longer sentences for three-time offenders led to “significantly faster rates of decline in robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft,” even after controlling for pre-existing crime trends and economic, demographic, and policy factors.
