Make wokeness expensive: Let victims sue organizations that bail out violent criminals
Washington Examiner
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In June 2020, then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) unwittingly drew attention to a serious national problem. She retweeted a fundraising pitch from the Minnesota Freedom Fund. This group, in the name of social justice, pays bail for almost any accused criminals, including habitual and violent offenders.
There are several such faux-charities, harming society and routinely creating new victims.
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The fund Harris cited sprang a career criminal last year named Sean Michael Tillman, a pervert with eight convictions for indecent exposure, including in the presence of a child. Tillman had also been convicted on gun charges when the “freedom fund” helped him make bail.
Once freed by these bogus benefactors, Tillman allegedly used his free time to commit murder, shooting his victim six times on a light rail platform in plain view of a surveillance video camera. He is awaiting trial in prison while serving a sentence for public masturbation.
This is story is not an isolated or remarkable one. Freeing such people is what Minnesota Freedom Fund exists to do. It previously spent $100,000 to bail out an accused murderer, $75,000 to bail out an accused child rapist with a prior sex offense conviction, $350,000 to bail out a twice-convicted rapist accused of kidnapping, assault, and sexual assault, and $4,000 to bail out a man accused of assaulting a 71-year-old woman while burglarizing her home who subsequently violated bail.
Those are only a few highlights. The number of questionable decisions by this organization to bail out killers, domestic abusers, rapists, and serial bail-jumpers is lengthy. The organization does not apparently care about public safety. To this day, Harris has not removed the tweet in which she supported it.
Unfortunately, the Minnesota Freedom Fund is just one of many nonprofit organizations inflicting this sort of harm on society — exploiting court leniency and creating a dangerous public nuisance by making sure violent and unstable people are on the streets and can do harm for as long as possible. A waiter, the victim of a similar group’s activities, is suing the Nevada chapter of the Bail Project after being shot 11 times by one of its bail beneficiaries. The Bail Project, he contends, freed his assailant on charges of burglary and grand larceny without considering violent crimes he might commit while on the loose.
In Minnesota, Republicans are talking about banning nonprofit organizations from paying bail. There is a clever idea in Oregon, where lawmakers proposed a bill creating a civil cause of action, which victims of bailed-out criminal defendants could bring against those who bailed them out (there is an exception for the defendant’s family members).
Obviously, neither of these is a long-term solution to the delinquent judicial and prosecutorial leniency that makes low bail available to violent and career criminals who are a threat to society. The key to making the streets safe, aside from increasing policing, is to elect prosecutors and judges who take firm action against violent and repeat criminals, sending them to prison and thus ending their threat to the public.
In the meantime, it makes sense to attach legal liability to organizations that put others at risk by bailing out recidivist criminals. If the accused is a harmless Aladdin stealing bread to feed his family, there’s no risk. But if these do-harm do-gooder organizations could face lawsuits, those such as Minnesota Freedom Fund and the Bail Project will have to consider public safety, not just pay lip service to it.
The public must forcefully reject the weird ideology that treats the desire to be safe as inherently racist. One of the tools for cleansing the nation of such faddish wokeism is to make it expensive. Let the lawsuits begin.
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