Criminal “justice reform” let “a violent rapist and murderer out of prison early,” notes Jazz Shaw at Hot Air:
Around the middle of last month, a maniac named Jason Billingsley assaulted and murdered Baltimore tech CEO Pava LePere, leaving her body on the roof of her apartment building. Only days earlier, he raped another woman and attempted to kill both her and her boyfriend in their apartment. A manhunt lasting for days finally resulted in the capture of the killer at a train station where he was apparently attempting to flee the state….But if all of that wasn’t bad enough, the situation is even more terrible because it turns out that Jason Billingsley had already been captured and convicted once before. But Maryland’s “justice reform” laws allowed him to get out of prison many years before the end of his sentence.
Bond has been denied for accused murderer and rapist Jason Billingsley.
Billingsley is accused of committing several crimes, including the murder of Baltimore tech CEO Pava LePere, as well as a violent home invasion where a woman was raped and a man was assaulted.
Billingsley was arrested at a MARC train station in Bowie, Maryland after a days-long manhunt.
Billingsley appeared by video for a bond hearing held at Baltimore City District court Friday, exactly one week after investigators say LaPere was murdered.
The details of Billingsley’s crimes make things even worse. As Shaw observes,
Billingsley didn’t just assault and kill LaPere. He pretended to be in need of help getting into her apartment building and she unfortunately decided to help him out. He then proceeded to assault her and beat her to death with a brick, leaving her half-naked body on the roof to be discovered a few days later.
At the apartment of the other couple, Billingsley feigned being a maintenance worker before kicking in their door. He threatened the couple with a knife, sexually assaulted the woman, slashed both of them, doused them with what was apparently lighter fluid, and set them on fire. They somehow survived. This vicious monster has no business walking the streets among decent citizens.
As NBC News reports, Billingsley has a long criminal record stretching back for more than a decade. He had previously been convicted of sexual assault, armed robbery, and false imprisonment. In 2015 he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. But due to sentence reductions known as “the diminution credit system,” he was released after just nine years:
Under a plea agreement, however, 16 of those years were suspended, leaving Billingsley to serve 14 years behind bars. Then in October 2022, five years ahead of his scheduled release, he walked out of prison a free man.
Billingsley was let out of prison under Maryland’s diminution credit system, a policy that allows inmates to reduce the term of their incarceration through such things as good behavior and completing educational courses. Thirty-eight states have similar programs on the books. The violent and repetitive nature of Billingsley’s crimes, however, have left many wondering why he was eligible for the credits and if he should have been released at all.
As Shaw points out,
This guy already had an established history of sexually assaulting women at knifepoint. But he was somehow given credit for “good behavior” behind bars and taking a couple of remote educational courses. Baltimore prosecutors had already suspended more than half of his sentence for his prior crimes, and the prison system knocked off five more years under the state’s “justice reform” laws. (His original conviction also included holding a woman at knifepoint and forcing her to perform oral sex on him.)
Murders have risen in Baltimore in recent years because progressive prosecutors there didn’t seek long sentences for people who committed serious crimes, even when they were adults. As a result, criminals are soon back on the street, where many of them go on to murder innocent people. Most murders in Baltimore are committed by people who previously were convicted of a serious crime, but didn’t serve a lengthy sentence for that crime, notes the City Journal:
Maryland Public Policy Institute researcher Sean Kennedy, who studied 110 homicide cases arising from January 2019 to July 2020, found that suspects in 77 of these had been previously convicted of a serious crime by Mosby’s office. Sixty-one of them (79 percent) faced statutory jail terms that should have kept them in prison beyond the date on which they allegedly committed the homicide.
Longer prison sentences would help stem the violence. Studies indicate that longer periods of incarceration deter many crimes from being committed by people who are not currently incarcerated; they don’t merely prevent people who are already inmates from committing more crimes — although they do that, too. For example, a study found that longer sentences deterred people from committing murder, robbery, and rape. (See Daniel Kessler & Steven J. Levitt, Using Sentence Enhancements to Distinguish Between Deterrence and Incapacitation, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #6484 (1998)).
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.
Shorter sentences also make inmates more likely to reoffend and commit more crimes. As Michael Rushford noted in the Washington Post, “an exhaustive, decade-long study released in June by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, tracking more than 32,000 federal offenders released from prison in 2010, found that offenders released after serving more than 10 years were 29 percent less likely to be arrested for a new crime than those who served shorter sentences. Offenders who served more than five years were 18 percent less likely to be arrested for new crimes compared to a matched group serving shorter sentences.”
