WASHINGTON (WUSA9) -- New, horrifying details are surfacing about what happened inside the Savopoulos mansion near Vice President Joe Biden's house before the murders.
A law enforcement source tell WUSA9's Bruce Leshan that detectives now believe the killers tortured the 10-year-old boy, Phillip Savopoulos, in the effort to get money out of his father.
Police believe the killers were in the house for about 10 hours, and that they successfully forced the Savopoulos family to get them tens of thousands of dollars. Someone may have actually had to go out and get the cash while the rest of the family and their housekeeper were held hostage.
The prime suspect in this grotesque crime is one Daron Dylan Wint.
Was Wint a stranger to the criminal justice system? Not exactly.
Fox has the story:
According to court records, Wint has an extensive criminal history in Prince George's County [a Maryland county that borders the District of Columbia]. Previous incidents include domestic violence, assault and burglary. A woman who identified herself as the suspect's sister told FOX 5 that Wint has been in trouble in the past, but she was surprised to learn that he's accused of a crime so serious.
In one incident in 2005, court documents show Wint stood out in front of his family's home and threatened to shoot both his father and stepmother. They filed a restraining order preventing him from any contact with them for one year, according to the documents obtained by The Washington Times.
Wint was convicted of assaulting one girlfriend in Maryland in 2009, and he pleaded guilty the next year to malicious destruction of property after he allegedly threatened to kill a woman and her infant daughter, breaking into her apartment, stealing a television and vandalizing her car.
"I'm going to come over there and kill you, your daughter and friends," Wint told that woman, according to the records. "The defendant advised he was good with a knife and could kill them easily and was not afraid of the police," a detective wrote.
Every day you pick up the paper, there's another story of how a soft, indifferent criminal justice system produces misery and (as in this instance) sometimes death for the innocent. This is the real, though hushed-up, outcropping of what-me-worry sentencing. No sensate person could have believed that it was safe to have Mr. Wint out on the street. But he got one soft sentence after the next. Gotta have compassion, dontcha know.Also in 2010, Wint was arrested carrying a 2-foot-long machete and a BB pistol outside the American Iron Works headquarters, but weapons charges were dropped after he pleaded guilty to possessing an open container of alcohol.
Wint's criminal history also extends to New York State, where he has three assault convictions that date back to 2007 in Oswego, N.Y. Wint also has an outstanding arrest warrant for criminal contempt for violating an order of protection in a case that involved a former girlfriend dating back to 2008 in Oswego.
Wint served jail time in New York for each of the convictions.
As a younger prosecutor then dealing with "non-violent" felonies I had a case where a group of women were committing organized large scale shoplifting throughout the Bay Area. Several of them had been arrested in nearly every nearby county for the same thing. When it came time for me to try to convince the court that enough was enough and that the light sentences they had gotten in the past may have actually encouraged their continued criminality, the judge had a different view. She said, "maybe those judges knew something that we didn't."
You can lead a horse to water, but apparently I couldn't make em drink. Some judges are just programmed to excuse criminal behavior. Some prosecutors are lazy, some jurors are easily led astray. These are the failures of a non-serious system in my view. I cannot even fathom what it looks like now with Realignment.
Funny thing happened. After the court refused my request to remand into custody pending sentencing, one of the defendant's picked up a new case before sentencing. All we got out of that was the court acknowledging that "I told her so." Nothing was said to the defendant and the indicated sentence by the court included no additional sanction.
How would reform of federal drug sentencing laws directly or even indirectly impact how our criminal justice system deals with individuals like Wint?
More to the point, perhaps, can one reasonably wonder if the prioritization of drug offenses by federal (and many state) officials in recent decades created an opportunity for violent individuals like Wint to not be subject to more serious sanctions in the past?
Sentencing reform (as well as marijuana legalization efforts) is ultimately about reorienting priorities and resources in the operations of the criminal justice system, and I continue to believe that cases like this help highlight why such a reorientation is needed.
A couple of points.
The basic problem this entry highlights is that innocent people will suffer from the "criminal-as-victim" ethos that, at its base, underlies sentencing reform.
Wint spent years telling us that he was a violent thug. But the addled judges who sentenced him didn't take it seriously. Maybe they wanted puff pieces in the NYT, or the Atlantic or the New Republic, or in some law review article about how compassionate they were, or how they believed in second chances.
So they gave Wint his second chance. And his third and fourth. Finally Wint got the message that the system isn't serious. We now see the result.
Of course the people who wind up paying the price for these judges' self-righteousness about how forward looking they are aren't the judges themselves. No, not that. It's a ten year-old who gets tortured so his father will pay up the extortion demands. And then murdered, along with everyone else in the house.
I'm sorry, this is just sick. There is no evidence that Wint received one day less because of marijuana laws. To the contrary, he got light sentences for a reason closely related to the attack on marijuana (and other drug) laws: That Amerika is too punitive, too Puritanical, too controlling and too racist.
As you have said explicitly, the sentencing reform movement is not just about drug laws. It's about lower sentences for violent offenders
(http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/2015/03/a-leading-advocate-of-sentenci.html).
This case is a wonderful, or a horrifying (depending on how one looks at it), preview of what lower sentences for violent offenders will lead to. It's not about "reorienting priorities" within the system. It's about dumbing down the system itself, top to bottom.
And the reason we should dumb-down the system? To give the Wints of the world a second chance.
There are, to be sure, those who want to give them that chance. I will not be among them.
Doug, it's pretty weak to try to deflect attention from the problem of lenient sentencing (much of which is a state issue) with federal marijuana sentences.
The fact is---President Obama whines about incarceration of young black men. I wonder if he'd revise his view based on this case.
What I think is weak, federalist, is making public policy based on anecdotes. For every evil Wint you or Bill can highlight, I can talk up a redeemed Charles Dutton. Morevoer, as I have often stressed on my blog, repeat drunk drivers kill more innocent people than repeat violent felons, and yet Bill does not highlight these cases (though many can be found from a quick news search). And then we have Weldon Angelos getting an extreme mandatory minimums for seemingly minor federal crimes.
Despite the clear evidence that drunk drivers pose a much great threat to innocent lives than marijuana dealers like Angelos, we do not incapacitate drunk drivers via lengthy prison terms. Why not, even though many innocent people "pay the price" for giving those caught drinking and driving a second chance? I suspect it is because we believe in freedom, in limited government, in not always sacrificing liberty for security, and in the capacity for human improvement. Flawed humans will not always (or even often) live up to the best ideals, but I'd rather treat them like humans with capacity to become better rather than as animals destined always to be rabid.
I sincerely believe that it is possible to reduce long prison sentences (especially federal sentences) and continue to see violent crime decline. Crack sentences were reduced in 2007 and 2010 and 2011 and 2014 (and Booker has enabled many below-guideline federal sentence for more than a decade), and we have not seen a crime spike. I think we can and should try to continue that positive momentum at the federal level with additional sentencing reductions. Similarly, many states have reduced prison populations and drug sentencing terms over the past decade, and crime has continued to decline in many of these states. I think we should seek to continue to learn from and build on this positive experience (which Bill never discusses because it undercuts an assertion that sentencing reform inevitably means more innocent victims).
Bill often in this space says we ought not seek a return to the practices of the 1960s and 1970s --- when our national incarceration rate was roughly 140/100,000. But nobody really advocates as much, as even the most agggressive advocacy is talking about trying to get our current rate of 700/100,000 cut in half.
I try to show respect for the belief, which I surmise that Bill and federalist and others hold sincrely, that it is always better to err on the side of over-incarceration. But I do not hold this belief. This is not because I think criminals are victims, but because I fear giving governments too much power over its citizenry in the name of the public good.
As I have stated before, I find notable that those who tend to express many concerns about misuse of government powers in the name of the public good in other settings seem eager in this setting to embrace and extol the achievements of big government here.
-- "What I think is weak, federalist, is making public policy based on anecdotes."
Glad to hear it. May I assume, then, that we won't be hearing more anti-MM anecdotes about Angelos, Silk Road, Williams (the Montana major pot dealer), and, more recently, the couple who got busted for sex on the beach?
My suspicion is that we'll continue to hear lots of the "MM horror story" anecdotes anyway, because they are the principal means by which sentencing reformers glide around the far more socially relevant fact that, system-wide, tougher sentences have helped bring down crime.
-- "For every evil Wint you or Bill can highlight, I can talk up a redeemed Charles Dutton."
And that is the last we hear of Wint.
This is one reason I put up a flag about hijacking threads.
This thread is about a horribly revealing case of what happens when the system takes a "the-criminal's-not-so-bad-why-don't-you-Nazis-lighten-up" view up sentencing.
Four people would be alive, instead of having suffered protracted, tormented deaths, if the system had taken Wint seriously. But it didn't, because it is wedded instead to exactly the same give-peace-a-chance pseudo-thinking that underlies the sentencing reform movement.
Will the sentencing reform movement learn a lesson from Wint and the repeatedly indulgent treatment he got at sentencing?
If there is any evidence it will, I'll be looking for it. I have this bad feeling I'll be looking a long time.
-- "I'd rather treat them like humans with capacity to become better rather than as animals destined always to be rabid."
It would hardly have been treating Mr. Wint as rabid, but merely as dangerous (which he certainly was), for at least one of his numerous prior sentences for violence to have been, say 10 or 12 years, instead of the nothingburgers he kept getting.
But then the sentencing reform bunch would have been screaming "racism!!!", not so? (If they're not screaming it now).
-- "I sincerely believe that it is possible to reduce long prison sentences (especially federal sentences) and continue to see violent crime decline."
Beliefs are not the point, whether yours or mine. Evidence is the point. The evidence (which I displayed here: http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/2015/05/the-broken-criminal-justice-sy.html) shows that the tremendously sharp decreases in violent crime occurred at precisely the time, from the early Nineties, when MM's were at their peak.
We should change the social policies that are failing, not the ones that are working. Why should that even be controversial?
Fair point about anti-MM anecdotes, Bill, but the key difference is that the legal changes I seek to see made --- e.g., passage of the JSVA and reform of marijuana prohibitions --- are directly relevant to the anecdotes I stress as they would directly address what I perceived to be harmful and wasteful over-incarcerations. Meanwhile, the federal sentencing changes you so vigorously oppose would impact in no direct or even indirect way the seemingly too lenient treatment that Wint received.
More to the point, especially as we zero in on how unduly severe drug sentences skew priorities priorities, I cannot help but wonder if the NY system dealt with Wint too lightly in part because it was still dealing with prisons too crowded because of the Rockfeller drug laws (which were not reformed until 2009). And where were federal prosecutors -- asleep at the switch? --- to use the big hammer of ACCA for a fellow like Wint since he clearly needed to be incapacitated for much longer than the likes of Weldon Angelos and Edward Young and Chris Williams and the Kettle Falls Five.
I agree that there are lessons to learn from the Wint experience, and I think that is what the "smart-on-crime" reform movement is seeking to achieve: learning, using data and other means, from both the successes and failings of recent legal and social reforms to figure out how we can keep crime going down.
Critically, Bill, the problem with the tough-and-tougher crowd is that you crow about the success of heavy use of incarceration when it serves your interests, but then you also assert that we cannot risk any reform even when the toughness is a proven failure. With respect to drug offenses throughout a 40-year drug-war, drugs have become more pure, more lethal and cheaper --- and the heroin epidemic of late is just the latest proof that for drug crimes prohibition with severe prison sentences is a failed public safety/health strategy. And yet you and Grassley and others respond to these obvious failings say we cannot risk drug sentencing reform now when the problem is so acute. In other words, when crime is high, you say we need to get tougher, when crime declines, you say toughness works.
Most critically, to my knowledge, there is still seemingly little effort to engineer wholesale changes to tough sentencing schemes for repeat violent offenders. Rather, there is an effort to bring evidence to bear to figure out how we can wisely learn from both successes and failures. I agree 100% that the Wint case is an example of the system failing --- but do you say the same thing about Angelos and Williams and Young? I am willing --- indeed eager --- to learn more about why Wint got treated so leniently in the past and to seek reforms in the hope of avoiding a repeat of this tragedy, but are you willing to learn more about why Angelos and Williams and Young got treated so harshly and to seek reforms to avoid a repeat of their stories?