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Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg may just be the worst “prosecutor” in the country. Everything about Bragg and his worldview exemplifies what’s wrong with Democratic “prosecutors” and the criminal justice reform movement they represent.
The latest example of Bragg’s incompetence and/or politicization of his office comes from the case of Brianna Rivers. In April, a pro-life activist was interviewing and debating pro-abortion fanatics in Manhattan when Rivers decided to punch her in the face. The crime was caught on camera, clear for all to see. It was as open and shut a case as you could find.
Bragg does not believe in enforcing the law, though, and so Rivers’s initial charge of second-degree assault was downgraded to a misdemeanor, with the paperwork shuffled off to the bench players on Bragg’s team. They then missed necessary paperwork deadlines to move forward on the case, and thus, the charges were dropped. Brianna Rivers punched a woman in the face because she didn’t like what the woman was saying. It was caught on video, and she faced no legal consequences.
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There are two possibilities here. The first is that Bragg’s team deliberately buried the case and let the deadline pass. Given how Bragg uses his office for advancing his political goals and not pursuing justice, this is not an implausible theory. But, if you want to take Bragg’s office’s word for it, they simply made an “unacceptable error of missing the discovery deadline” despite believing that “every victim deserves their day in court.” The defense Bragg’s team is asking you to accept is that they are so incompetent that they cannot prosecute a cut-and-dry assault case when handed video evidence of the assault and everything leading up to it by the victim herself.
Ask yourself this, though: If a pro-lifer punched a pro-choice woman in the face and that assault was caught on video, can you possibly imagine Alvin Bragg missing a paperwork deadline on that case? Could you imagine anything other than Bragg hosting a press conference talking about an unacceptable attack that would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law?
This would have been one of the top four high-profile cases prosecuted by Bragg’s office if the circumstances had been reversed, because Bragg would have made it so. When you dig into his current top three, you can see exactly where Bragg’s priorities lie in the criminal justice system.
Two of them are self-defense cases. Daniel Penny stepped in on the New York City subway to restrain Jordan Neely, a mentally unstable homeless man who was acting erratically and threatening passengers on the train. Neely ended up dying from a chokehold. Since Neely was black and Penny was white, Bragg then spent the next 19 months trying to throw Penny behind bars for the crime of being the only person in New York City trying to keep people from being assaulted or stabbed on the subway.
The other case was that of Jose Alba, a 61-year-old man working the counter at a bodega. A woman became mad at Alba when her card declined and yelled that she was going to bring her boyfriend to “f*** you up.” Later, Austin Simon arrived, threatening Alba, cornering him behind the counter, and assaulting him. Alba, in reasonable fear for his life from someone half his age towering over him, stabbed Simon in self-defense. Simon later died from his wounds.
At the time, Austin Simon was on parole for assault. His girlfriend ended up stabbing Alba twice in the arm during the confrontation. But she was not charged with anything. Bragg did not have to answer for this obviously still-violent criminal being free on parole. Instead, he charged Alba with murder, threw him in prison at Riker’s Island while asking for a $500,000 bail, and was fully prepared to sentence the man to up to 25 years in prison. It was only national backlash to multiple surveillance camera videos that caused Bragg to back down from his attempts to ruin the life of a 61-year-old man who would have been put in a hospital (or the ground) had he not defended himself.
In both examples, Bragg sought to criminalize civilians defending themselves or others from violent criminals, a wider extension of the view commonly held by Democratic “prosecutors” that criminals are actually victims of society and should serve little, if any, jail time for their crimes. That is reflected in comparing 2019 (pre-COVID-19 pandemic) to Bragg’s first year in office in 2022. Felony cases resulting in convictions dropped from 68% to 51% and misdemeanors resulting in convictions dropped from 53% to 29%. There were 500 fewer felony cases that resulted in prison sentences and a whopping 1,900 fewer misdemeanor cases leading to jail time under Bragg in that comparison. The only notable increase: Bragg downgraded 52% of felonies to misdemeanors, up from 39% previously.
Bragg has used his position to implement his preferred criminal justice policies by circumventing the legislature and doing everything he can to keep criminals out of jail. Bragg entered office bragging about fighting “over-incarceration,” shortening criminal sentences, and refusing to prosecute certain crimes, as well as trying to downgrade armed robberies even if the suspect flashed a weapon. His entire tenure as district attorney has been about undermining the law to impose his criminal justice reforms unilaterally, a cog in the criminal justice reform machine funded by George Soros that has helped elect like-minded “prosecutors” across the country.
That brings us to the third of Bragg’s top three most high-profile prosecutions, and the one he wants to hang his hat on: The prosecution of Donald Trump. Bragg boasted throughout his campaign about how he had gone after Trump, and promised he would continue investigating the then-former president. Bragg then pushed forward with a prosecution full of tortured legal logic that did not even require a jury to agree on the underlying crimes. Bragg won, gave Democrats the ‘Trump is a convicted felon’ talking point they wanted, and showed just how warped the criminal justice system can become when the steward in charge of it uses it for cynical political purposes and nothing else.
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Bragg is not alone, but the face of Democratic “prosecutors” exploiting the system. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis similarly tried to lead a political prosecution of Trump in Georgia. In Virginia, Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano has taken a soft-on-crime approach, culminating in his protecting a registered sex offender from prosecution, in all likelihood because he claims to be transgender. Portland continues to allow Antifa rioters to assault people and vandalize buildings, with no arrests or prosecutions on the horizon. This is the story for Democratic prosecutors in every state across the country.
Bragg just so happens to be the unfortunate one (or fortunate, if his Democratic star shines bright enough to secure a political future in the party) who happens to be neglecting public safety in one of the most high-profile jurisdictions in the country. The 1.6 million people who live in Manhattan have a front row seat to the distortions that a Democratic prosecutor can put the legal system through, because no one better represents Democratic prosecutorial abuse of power than Alvin Bragg.