Left-wing soft-on-crime prosecutor dropped prior felony gun charge against Michigan State shooter

A man who killed three people and wounded five others on the campus of Michigan State University before killing himself earlier this week would not have legally been allowed to own a firearm at the time of the incident if not for a left-wing ‘progressive’ prosecutor dropping prior felony gun charges against him.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, “Anthony McRae was charged in June 2019 with illegally carrying a concealed handgun without a permit, but later had those charges dismissed by the office of Ingham County district attorney Carol Siemon (D.). Her office instead let McRae plead guilty to a lesser misdemeanor gun charge, and he served a little more than a year on probation, which ended May 2021.”

The Detroit News added that McRae not only would have lost his gun ownership rights but he would have faced five years in prison for the felony charge — meaning he would not have even been able to walk onto the Michigan State campus in the first place.

Siemon retired from her position as district attorney earlier this year after she faced relentless criticism from law enforcement officials and judges over her refusal to uphold laws and put people who belonged in jail behind bars. So she really does have blood on her hands over McRae’s crime.

The same year the shooter was released, Ingham County Sheriff Scott Wriggelsworth pressured East Lansing’s city council “to reconsider her internal felony firearm charging policy,” which he noted “does not hold people properly criminally accountable, and increases the likelihood of additional gun violence.”

In August 2021, Siemon made it official policy within her office to dismiss mandatory prison sentences for felony firearms charges, claiming that the sentencing enhancement led to “dramatic racial inequity” and was “not in any way linked to the goal that we share of keeping the public safe.”

To be sure, these sentencing enhancements, which were widely adopted by jurisdictions around the country and dropped by many other George Soros-funded DAs in leftist cities, were never enacted due to racism or because city councils wanted to put more people of color behind bars. They were literally enacted as a public safety measure, so when ‘progressive’ DAs like Siemon claim they are getting rid of them to make the public safer, they are literally lying; their motives are purely ideological, and public safety be damned.

“Siemon is part of George Soros’s vast public safety network. She has participated in international criminal justice reform junkets with other ‘reform-minded’ prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner (D.), Chicago’s Kim Foxx (D.), and Los Angeles’s George Gascón. She also backed radical San Francisco prosecutor Chesa Boudin (D.) ahead of a recall campaign that eventually ousted him from office last year,” the Free Beacon noted further.

The Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office noted in a statement that in 2019, McCrae’s offense would not have landed him “the legal maximum” prison sentence if the case had been pursued.

“Even if he were convicted by a jury of the original charge, Anthony McRae would not have been recommended for a jail or prison sentence,” the office said. “The sentencing guideline score would have been the same if he had been convicted of either the original charge (Carrying a Concealed Weapon) or the offense for which he was convicted (carrying a firearm in a vehicle).”

That’s because of Siemon’s dropping the gun enhancement.

Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, told the Free Beacon that “progressive prosecutors such as Ms. Siemon continue to value reducing the incarcerated population over their duty to protect the public by enforcing the law.”

“She is not a legislator, she is not a judge, and she is making our community unsafe,” Michigan Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said of the former DA.

Sources include:

FreeBeacon.com

DetroitNews.com