Horowitz: Judge applies critical race theory to release career gang member from gun felony charges

A leftist federal judge in Manhattan evidently thinks there aren't enough ways to turn gun felons loose onto the streets. She has now applied critical race theory to add another way to release alleged gun felons; namely, by disqualifying grand jury indictments because not enough jury members were black, therefore rendering the jury pool inherently racist toward black suspects.

Abolishing the police is only a minor part of the public safety problem responsible for reversing two decades of miraculously low crime in New York City. Left-wing judges are abolishing all criminal justice deterrent. On Monday, District Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York dismissed a gun felony indictment of William Scott on the grounds that he was tried in a part of the district that did not have enough non-whites on the grand jury, according to the New York Post.

"Defendant has produced clear statistical evidence of underrepresentation of Black and Latinx individuals in the pool from which his grand jury was drawn, and a jury selection process that was susceptible to abuse," Torres wrote. She was extremely meticulous, using census data and the latest nomenclature to describe Latinos, but provided zero facts to support the conclusion that the indictment from last June was tainted in any way. She ruled that this particular grand jury scheme did not use "inactive voters," which she found "decreased the percentage of Black individuals on the Master Wheel by 0.34 percentage points, and the percentage of Latinx individuals by 0.43 percentage points."

In reality, so long as there is not a shred of bias on this particular case, there is no constitutional right to a computer-generated census that perfectly reflects every demographic permutation in the broader population. As the Supreme Court said in Holland v. Illinois, (1990), "Defendants are not entitled to a jury of any particular composition" and there is "no requirement that petit juries actually chosen must mirror the community and reflect the various distinctive groups in the population." If that's true for a trial jury, it most certainly is true for a grand jury. While this is a federal case, many states don't even require grand juries to bring indictments for state felonies; the prosecutor presents them alone. Are we going to say that only a black prosecutor can indict a black suspect?

Judges like Torres like to have it both ways — demand special rules for COVID but then violate those rules. In this case, Scott was charged in White Plains on felony possession of ammunition instead of in Manhattan because of the COVID restrictions. The entire judicial system has been upended because of COVID restrictions, much like individual rights of innocent citizens, which resulted in the release of so many violent criminals. Yet when it comes to convening a grand jury on this case in a different part of the same judicial district, suddenly Torres believes the defendant's Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights were violated.

It's funny how nobody seemed concerned about 50% of the jurors in the Chauvin trial being non-white, even though the makeup of Hennepin County is 74% white, or about the blatant examples of bias from the jurors. One of the jurors even attended a Black Lives Matter event. Also, in the White Plains case, this was merely a grand jury for the indictment, not the trial. Prosecutors believed that a delay in the case would endanger public safety, but this phantom right to a racially diverse grand jury was able to trump COVID logistics while unambiguous civil rights of peaceful citizens were swatted down in nearly every court case on the altar of public health safety.

Scott, 43, is a reputed member of the Bloods gang, and this federal gun charge stems from a shooting he is alleged to have been involved in last June. Scott was caught illegally possessing ammunition near the scene where the victim was shot in the leg twice. Court records show Scott had at least 25 prior arrests dating back to the 1990s, including busts for attempted murder on a failed shooting, assault, theft, weapons possession, and drug charges. This is the profile of the sort of individuals terrorizing the streets.

Here is a list of the charges I've been able to find from Scott's criminal record.

If you want to know why there is so much gun violence on the streets, it's because gun criminals are being released by leftist judges like Torres. In many ways, these judges are more culpable than even the street rioters deterring police from doing their jobs. Judges like Torres have taken critical race theory and enshrined it into law itself.

Incidentally, Torres is the same judge who ruled that the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy is unconstitutional. This is the policy that is widely credited with turning around the city. Studies have shown that the termination of stop-and-frisk led to the catastrophic rise in shootings in Chicago since 2016. Undoubtedly, New York has followed a similar trajectory.

Before crime spirals to a breaking point, there is a need to create a private cause of action for victims of crime to sue judges who release criminals who have a clear proclivity to reoffend. Perhaps that will help remove critical race theory from the courtroom, an exponentially greater threat than even in the classroom.