California’s criminal justice system is so weak that it will release child predators on bail after they have been convicted of their crimes, with no mind to the consequences and the threat to the public.
The FBI has tracked down Carl Cacconie in Arizona after he spent nearly 10 months on the run. He had been convicted of six counts of “committing lewd acts upon a child under the age of 14” for abusing an 11-year-old girl. Cacconie was facing up to 18 years in prison and yet somehow ended up over 600 miles away from where he was convicted in El Dorado County, California, being captured in Scottsdale.
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How did this happen? Because, after Cacconie was convicted, Judge Michael McLaughlin denied the prosecution’s request to take Cacconie into custody before sentencing. Instead, he had Cacconie fitted with a monitoring device and released him on bail. Cacconie’s sentencing was set for more than five weeks after his conviction, meaning that California let a convicted child predator roam free for five weeks for no discernible reason. In a surprise to absolutely no one, one week before the sentencing hearing, Cacconie’s monitoring device was shut off, and he left behind a fake suicide note before fleeing the state.
How is this a justice system? How, under California law, is it even an option for a judge to let a convicted child predator roam around society for five weeks before sending him to jail? Under what logic is a child predator considered to neither be a flight risk nor a threat to public safety, and so allowed to be released with nothing but a confiscated passport and an easy-to-tamper-with monitoring device? Cacconie was a 52-year-old man facing up to 18 years behind bars. Did McLaughlin really think the man had no incentive to try to flee justice?
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McLaughlin has shown quite clearly that he is unfit to be a judge. His judgment is fatally flawed, and he should be nowhere near any element of the criminal justice system. But why does California allow a judge like McLaughlin to have such wide discretion in the first place? How is immediately releasing a convicted child predator even an option on the table for an incompetent judge to use in a case like this? That is a policy choice by California Democrats, who know the state is rife with soft-on-crime judges who abuse their discretion and are willing to release public safety threats like Cacconie.
The easiest solution to soft-on-crime judges putting communities in danger is to strip them of the discretion they enjoy when it comes to sentencing and supervised release. In Cacconie’s case, it is clear that there is no reason a judge should have such wide discretion as to be able to release him immediately after his conviction. That this is even a possibility is further proof that California Democrats do not care about keeping communities safe from dangerous criminals.