Which in the eyes of our law makes their crimes less horrible, even if you kill dozens of people, piling up so many bodies you have to map out dump sites.
But, it was just women. And a few little girls and babies. And some men. So you won’t hear Eric Holder fulminating about how important it is that we have Removed These Hate Criminals From Society.
Wesley Shermantine
Loren Herzog: Not a Killer Killer, Just a Manslaughterer
Oops, silly me. We actually let Herzog go free.
Loren Herzog was released after anti-incarceration activists in California got his multiple murder sentence reduced to manslaughter with help from the California Appeals Court. Score another point for our out-of-control rules of evidence. Herzog confessed repeatedly and was read his rights repeatedly, but some lawyer colluding with a bunch of self-important judges decided that they would strike a blow for postmodern adjudication and overturned his murder convictions, giving him manslaughter instead. Herzog then got time off for “good behavior” and walked out of prison in 2010. The prosecutors had decided to bargain with him, rather than trust a jury to convict him again. Why? Probably because it’s California.
No word on why they didn’t even try to pop him for three strikes. But three-strikes is unfair and has been overturned by the public. In California.
Pretty sexist term, manslaughter. Somebody should make a federal case about that.
Maybe then Eric Holder would be interested.
The Sixth Appellate District in California declared that their decision to throw out the multiple confessions in Herzog’s case should not be used to decide other cases. In other words, they knew they were being grotesquely political in their actions but cut him loose anyway to make themselves feel above politics. Judges’ self-esteem matters more than justice.
The San Joaquim Record weighed in with a ludicrous editorial about Herzog’s imagined “rehabilitation.” Journalists like to see themselves as little balloons of righteous sensibility floating above the angry rabble:
[S]ince he could eventually be among us, we hope he succeeds. We hope he becomes the productive member of society he so utterly failed to become before.
Aww, how touching. How . . . rational. But maybe it’s not the smartest Hallmark moment to hope for a serial killer to “succeed.” That’s about as digestible as the court hemming and hawing about whether they should require Herzog to hold a job. This is how the black robes spend your money, while money couldn’t be found to dig up and identify all the bodies. Nobody was ashamed enough to tamp down the parroting rituals of the sacrament of rehabilitation, not even in this case.
The new normal in criminal justice is psychotic. California is now well into demonstrating the logical endgame of the “root causes” theory of crime, which blames an unfair society, not criminals themselves, for the crimes they commit. Root causes theory is the prerequisite for dehumanizing victims to the point that their offenders assume their place in the pantheon of sympathy emanating from courtrooms and newsrooms. A mother can wait decades to get her daughter’s tooth or a bone fragment to bury, but there is a system in place to counsel serial killers on their job prospects when the state cuts them loose.
Michaela Garecht
Cyndi Vanderheiden
Kimberly Billy
Chevelle Wheeler
JoAnn Hobson
Now, if these murders were viewed as hate crimes, federal money would be raining down, and Herzog would have never, ever walked free . . . see how the game works?
Californians just voted to speed-dial their crime sentencing back to the Seventies. A $2.4 million dollar donation from George Soros, and another cool million from Stanford Professor of Dismissing Murder David Mills greased the skids. Expect more horrific injustices to pile up, like Herzog and Shermantine’s forgotten victims.
As ordinary criminal law gets gutted financially and ethically, the sanctimonious and prejudiced Hate Crimes enforcers scour the nation to make examples of people who use homophobic slurs while robbing people, or who spray paint ugly words on innocent sidewalks. This is how we make some people less human than others. Ironically, George Soros funds the hate crimes movement at the same time he funds movements to excuse other murderers.
The mere existence of hate crime laws makes the justice system deeply . . . unserious. Maybe we should expect unserious outcomes. When someone can admit killing a dozen people, and it doesn’t create outrage when he is released from prison, and the courts decide just to not try him for most of his crimes, while at the same time a faked racial slur sparks mass federal investigations and months of headlines, can anyone call that serious?
It’s not justice anymore: it’s a clown show. Prostitution, not adjudication. Holder and his peers have sold off pieces of our law enforcement system to the racial, ethnic and gay activists who scream the loudest, while bending over backward to “re-enter” ordinary murderers and rapists back into society.
As Judge Dredd says, there’s no justice, there’s just us.
This is Loren Herzog’s attorney Peter Fox, who crudely suggested that his victims get over their anger at Herzog. “It’s not fair to call him a killer. He is just guilty of having the world’s worst friend,” is how Fox characterized Herzog, who regaled investigators with details of multiple, vicious killings committed with his friend Wesley Shermantine back when they were caught in 1999. Here is one recent development:
A bag of remains returned by sheriff’s deputies to the mother of one victim was later determined by a forensic anthropologist to contain commingled fragments of at least two other people, one believed to be a long-missing child.
The only tiny silver lining on this fat cloud of horror? Herzog killed himself last year when Shermantine, who is still on California’s death row, started telling police where to find more of the bodies. Of course, until Herzog’s death he was using our tax dollars to litigate for himself, the type of litigation that we are required to pay for. Meanwhile, investigating his murders is something the prosecutor’s office has to hold a bake sale to underwrite.
Prioritizing expenses is the least noticed part of the criminal justice system. Vicious killers can wake up in the morning and demand a hearing on any frivolous thing, and they are provided with attorneys and court dates and endless bites at the apple to challenge the most absurd non-issues relating to their cases. This is the world defense attorneys and the ACLU have built. Meanwhile, their victims have to lobby to have the murder sites excavated so they can have something to bury — a bone or a tooth.
David Mills, “advocate for social justice”
Thanks, George Soros. Thanks, Eric Holder. Thanks, David Mills and the rest of the warped Law Professoriate, who can detect teardrops sparkling in the eyes of serial killers while mocking the mothers of murdered girls. Thanks, especially, ACLU. And thanks, voters of California.
The horror show you make is the horror show you now have to live with.
My word! there are some strange people in America.