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The rundown
Attorney General Jason Miyares penned commentary responding to Shawn Weneta’s piece published in this newsletter yesterday.
Speaker Don Scott announced that he donates $3 million to House candidates for this cycle.
Spanberger released a new ad.
Gilbert was sworn in as Western District United States Attorney.
Today’s Sponsor: Virginians Against Neighborhood Slot Machines
While neighborhood slot machines are illegal in Virginia, they continue to flood our streets. These machines remain in our neighborhoods, targeting low-income communities. Our Commonwealth should enforce its ban – fully and without exceptions.
Attorney General Jason Miyares
Guest Commentary: Virginia’s Early Release Program Raped an 11-Year-Old; Murdered 53 People
by Attorney General Jason Miyares
I am personally gratified to see Shawn Weneta go out of his way to quote G.K. Chesterton regarding fashions and fallacies in defense of Virginia’s early release program. Of course, if Weneta were a literate person, he would have known that Chesterton was drawing from Voltaire’s reminder that those who make you believe absurdities can also make you defend atrocities. Such is the cost of Virginia’s early release program.
Naturally, Weneta is personally invested in this debate, with his own story involving a 20-year sentence for grand larceny. Yet it was our own deputy attorney general, Theo Stamos, who wrote the letter asking the court for leniency on his behalf, reducing his sentence by nine years.
Second chances are indeed important, but second chances should never make victims feel second class. Instead, because of Virginia’s early release program, 53 Virginians were murdered and an 11-year-old girl was raped (among others) all because Democrats chose criminals over victims — and worse, they are defending the cost as a ‘one-off.’
No small wonder then why there was such outrage when defenders of Virginia’s early release program used the outrageous term ‘one-off’ to describe the victims. Once more, we have another example of how advocacy for the absurd — and in this case, one of the most open and thoughtless early release programs in the nation — leads Democrats into defending the atrocious.
With regards to the early release of sexual predator and child rapist Daniel Vanover, if Weneta had bothered to contact the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC), he would have learned that Vanover most certainly did receive enhanced early release credits after being imprisoned for failure to register as a violent sex offender and several probation violations — all of which relate back to his original conviction for taking indecent liberties with a child, including the solicitation of a teenage girl for sex for $20 back in 2009.
Yet instead of serving his full sentence, Vanover was released early, and immediately after getting out began grooming and then raping a 5th grade girl. This went on for months — and resulted in 11 different convictions.
The numbers are stunning. In the first 18 months of this grand social experiment, 53 people murdered by individuals who should have been behind bars but were instead mindlessly turned loose on Virginia families, including 6 manslaughter charges, 24 rapes, 104 robberies, 471 felony assaults, 33 arsons, 66 DUIs, 152 abductions, 220 weapons charges, 69 sexual assaults, 794 larceny and fraud cases, 214 burglaries, and 3,629 property crimes.
That is a grand total of 7,356 victims — not ‘one-offs’ but real victims whose perpetrators should have been behind bars but for the grand social experimentations of Virginia Democrats.
Victims such as these are not mere accidents. These victims were created through a policy of early release and are the direct result of a criminal-first, victim-last agenda that ignored repeated warnings from Republican legislators, law enforcement, victims’ advocacy groups, and policy makers alike.
These voices were all ignored.
Since we are discussing fashions and fallacies, this is a good moment to clarify the difference between correlation and causation — an elementary distinction Weneta seems eager to ignore.
While Weneta attributes all sorts of fascinating qualities to early release, the most remarkable quality seems to be that of time travel. By his telling, Weneta claims that the recently released VADOC 2020-2021 recidivism statistics are what they are because of early release. That’s quite a feat for an early release statute that didn’t take effect until the summer of 2022.
One wonders how the early release policy of 2022 could possibly have impacted recidivism data from 2020 or 2021? Which presents us with a more alarming concern, namely that what we are seeing now from early release recidivism numbers are in fact the tip of an unknown iceberg.
Having failed cause and effect, Weneta tries apples and oranges next. We can easily dispense with any comparisons of Virginia’s early release program with the First Step Act. If the First Step Act is a belt, then Virginia’s EESC program isn’t a pair of suspenders, it’s a trampoline for criminals.
For instance, FSA credits are applied; EESC credits are by design automatic — even for child sexual predators. Candidates under the FSA have to qualify first; under EESC there is no requirement at all, even if the inmate is at high risk either to be rearrested or commit another violent crime. Not only this, but Virginia’s EESC is more than three times more lenient in removing time from a sentence than the FSA credits. Weneta can continue watering his dead plants, but it’s about as useful as an inflatable dartboard.
Meanwhile, if we are looking for solutions, Virginia offers bipartisan examples of success built on a novel principle: if you want to reduce crime, prosecute criminals and keep them behind bars.
Ceasefire Virginia continues to show real results, despite the efforts of an absurd few to put violent criminals back into our communities. Our murder rates are down 30%, violent crime is down 11%, and Ceasefire cities were responsible for 66% of the reduction in murders. This is neither theory nor wishful thinking but results that come through the defense of victims rather than at victims’ expense.
Regarding the false reporting and shock headlines Weneta cites from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, if the General Assembly gives money to help victims of sexual assault, I make zero apologies for those who fight to make sure that as close to 100% of those resources go to actual victims of sexual assault, and not to support radical ideological agendas or backroom political deals. Of all people, Weneta knows precisely why hard questions should be asked to protect against potential fraud, especially as it concerns victims of sexual assault. It is absurd to suggest otherwise.
C.S. Lewis once observed that we all want progress, but if you are on the wrong road, the one who turns back the soonest is the most progressive man. Let’s admit that there is nothing progressive about refusing to admit a mistake. Taking the wrong road and pressing forward doesn’t get us any closer to the right place. In fact, in only doubles down on the absurdities that Virginia Democrats simply cannot abandon — but choose to force upon the rest of us.
Second chances are for the sort of progress which recognizes a mistake and fixes it, not the sort of solecism which treats the victims of violent crime as affordable ‘one-offs’ in the pursuit of objectively absurd policies. The numbers prove it; the victims must live it.
Weneta was a beneficiary of the sort of second chances which Lewis might have identified as progress. It would be a shame if voices such as Weneta’s — in his zeal for the wrong kind of progress — continued to choose the fashions and fallacies of the wrong sort of progress.
If the test of moral ideas are moral results, these results are being measured in broken lives and lives needlessly lost. That should strike us all as a mistake not worth defending.
