National Review Online
Tuesday, June 07, 2022
The foundational duty of government is to maintain public safety and order, without which neither liberty nor prosperity is possible. The dramatic story of the summer of 2020 was the outbreak of riots and protests following the murder of George Floyd. More than a dozen people were killed and a billion or more dollars in damages were caused, including the destruction of many businesses. This cried out for a vigorous response.
Instead, apparently viewing the cause as a righteous one, Democratic prosecutors at the federal, state, and local levels have been scandalously soft on the many crimes committed in the course of those riots and protests. Large numbers of offenders were let off scot-free by progressive prosecutors; even those whose crimes caused death have been given sentences no longer than ten years. In so doing, the progressive district attorneys and the Justice Department have imperiled public safety in our cities and undermined public confidence in the even-handed administration of law. It is unsurprising that urban crime and violence have spiked in many cities after the law failed to restore order or punish criminality.
The Biden administration has just added to this shameful spectacle by retroactively reducing the plea-bargained sentence in one of the most high-profile of those crimes, in which two white-shoe lawyers in Brooklyn threw a Molotov cocktail into a police car.
Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman were well-compensated attorneys in their early thirties when they joined the protesting mob in May 2020. Rahman was caught on tape throwing the firebomb into an unoccupied police car, and Mattis was arrested with more such improvised explosives in his car and was videotaped trying to hand them out to others. These are gravely serious crimes, more so than those committed by all but a tiny handful (at most) of the people charged in connection with January 6. An unapologetic Rahman told reporters later, “The only way they hear us is through violence.”
Mattis and Rahman pleaded guilty last year to one count of possessing and making an explosive device, a charge carrying up to ten years in prison. Both of them will quite properly be disbarred. Federal prosecutors sought to charge them with still more serious offenses for distribution but, in a shocking reversal, have now agreed to recommend a prison sentence of 18 to 24 months for charges carrying a maximum of five years. Even for a Justice Department that has bent over backwards to be lenient towards left-wing protesters while throwing the book at right-wing protesters, a retreat from a previous plea agreement is a dramatic display of favoritism for left-wing political violence.
Merrick Garland is right to make examples of those who rioted at the Capitol on January 6, and right to pursue genuinely violent right-wing extremism. Riots and violence originating on the political right should be met with a firm hand. But he and big-city progressive prosecutors have badly undermined the public legitimacy of those prosecutions by refusing to take the same approach to their own side. Justice that plays political favorites is not justice at all.
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