On a warm summer night, Kristin Van Goor was jolted awake by the sound of knocking.
She hurried down the wooden staircase in her pajamas. Through the windows, she saw red and blue police lights flashing, and her husband, Dave, on the doorstep.
A detective in a police cruiser shouted, "Are you all good?" Dave gave a nod and walked inside their Hill East home, just after midnight.
Dave paced in the living room. The memories spilled out in jagged pieces.
He remembered the black gun held to his head.
Three young men, wearing black masks over their faces, surrounded him as he walked home from the Stadium-Armory Metro station about 11:30 p.m. on Aug. 20, 2015. They grabbed his backpack. They took his phone and laptop, his wallet and keys. They dug deeper still into his pockets and fished out the last bit of loose change.
Just get through this, Dave thought. Just survive.
During the days and months to follow, one young man would be linked to the crime. In a span of several months, he would leave a trail of terror across the region, only to be granted a break under the Youth Rehabilitation Act, a D.C. law often used by judges seeking to give second chances to young violent offenders.
The man's case is one of more than 3,000 felony sentences handed down since 2010 under the law, which allows for leniency in some sentences and the opportunity for offenders to emerge with no criminal record.
The story that brings together that young man, the Van Goors and other victims illuminates the difficulty of trying to protect a young man's future and society at the same time. It also shows how victims suffer not just during the crime, but also in the aftermath -- how the system can leave them disillusioned and deliver not justice but frustration.
It's a long article, but worth your time.
For the moment, I'll draw only two lessons. First, the aim of sentencing "reform" is not shorter sentences for "non-violent, low level" offenders. It's shorter sentences for criminals of every stripe, including violent thugs (as the DC law makes abundantly clear). This fact is often (and intentionally) papered over -- but occasionally said out loud -- by sentencing "reform" advocates. (Prof. John Pfaff comes to mind as one who has been honest about it, and about the true ambitions of the "reform" movement).
Second, the leniency-for-everyone goal, while as noted often obscured, is obvious when you think about it. When you view crime as the product not of individual choice, greed and selfishness, but of societal callousness, racism and cruelty, what else, other than mass sentencing reduction, could possibly be just? An evil society does not take out its heartlessness only on "low level" pot smokers. Indeed, it does not take out its heartlessness primarily on them, having made such "low level" offenses de facto legal for decades.
No, society vents its spleen on the most "downtrodden," i.e.,the ones most "at risk" (as reformers would say in their upside-down language) to commit the most harshly penalized crimes. In order for society to right this wrong -- not to mention get a bit of what it has coming for its decades of oppression -- of course the most serious felons should get the biggest breaks.
This is the logic of sentencing "reform." Read the Post's article and see for yourself where it leads.
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