From Biden to Bragg: How the Left Hijacked Criminal Justice

In 2018, Darian McWoods was sentenced to life in prison for the unthinkable: the murder of his own 15-month-old daughter. No one disputed the crime. There was no exculpatory evidence, no claim of mistaken identity. Yet in 2024, McWoods was given a chance at a new trial, not because new facts had emerged, but because his original jury lacked racial diversity. Instead of retrying the case, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. The judge, Democrat Christopher Marshall, accepted the deal. McWoods will be released next year.

That is not a failure of evidence or legal process. It is a deliberate subversion of justice. And it is precisely the kind of judicial leniency that legislators in the 1980s and 1990s tried to stop. Their solution was mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, sentencing guidelines, mechanisms designed to ensure that the gravity of a crime would not be diluted by ideology. But as we now see in cities from San Francisco to Philadelphia, this legal architecture has been quietly dismantled. Not through repeal, but through defiance. And the consequences are staggering.

We should begin with a simple premise: the original move toward mandatory sentencing was a reaction to real dysfunction. Before these reforms, most US jurisdictions gave judges and prosecutors broad discretion. That discretion, critics argued, became a vector for injustice, not of harshness, but of laxity. Violent criminals walked free. Drug traffickers received probation. A murder conviction in one county meant life, while in another, it meant parole in ten years.

As early as 1982, California’s Victims’ Bill of Rights accused judges and prosecutors of endangering the public with their permissiveness. The message was clear: we no longer trust you to do your jobs. The same mood prevailed in Washington. Senator Strom Thurmond warned of “slaps on the wrist” for hardened criminals. Joe Biden, never one to avoid a spotlight, thundered that “we’ve got to take the power away from those who think they know better.” That sentiment gave rise to a new era: fixed sentences, uniform penalties, and the legislative override of judicial discretion.

It worked, at least in part. Crime fell. Consistency rose. For all their flaws, mandatory minimums succeeded in standardizing penalties and reassuring the public that justice would no longer vary with ZIP code. But these laws, durable though they seemed, depended on something more fragile: compliance. The legal system is a chain, and it only works when every link holds. Soros-backed prosecutors and judges understood this perfectly. Their insight was devastating in its simplicity: if you cannot repeal the law, ignore it.

What began as academic theorizing about over-incarceration metastasized into a nationwide strategy. Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Kim Foxx in Chicago, George Gascón in Los Angeles, Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, each embraced a model of "progressive prosecution" that explicitly sought to nullify tough-on-crime laws. What made this model viable was not local support alone, but funding. Almost every one of these prosecutors rode into office on a wave of spending from far-left nonprofits, most traceable to George Soros's Open Society Foundation, which functions less like a charity and more like a judicial demolition crew.

The tactics vary, but the goal is the same. In Manhattan, Bragg downgraded over half of felony charges to misdemeanors. In Philadelphia, Krasner simply stopped prosecuting entire classes of crimes. In Los Angeles, Gascón banned prosecutors from using sentencing enhancements, even when gang or gun charges applied. In Chicago, Kim Foxx dismissed over 25,000 felony cases in three years, including not just drug charges, but homicides and assaults on police.

Critics of the old system argued that mandatory minimums removed discretion from those best equipped to judge individual cases. Perhaps. But today we see the opposite problem: discretion deployed not to humanize the law, but to defeat it. This discretion is no longer exercised case-by-case, but categorically, ideologically, and often incompetently.

The results are measurable. Philadelphia's murder rate exploded under Krasner, reaching a historic high of 562 homicides in 2021. Chicago's homicides surged past 800 in the same period. San Francisco, always more statistically subtle, suffered a flood of property crime and public drug use. In each of these cities, the public turned: Boudin was recalled, Foxx declined to seek reelection, and Gascón barely survived a recall challenge. But the damage remains.

The danger of this prosecutorial resistance is not just what it permits, but what it teaches. The McWoods case is instructive. A man convicted of killing his infant daughter walks free not because of innocence, but because of ideology. His original sentence, like so many imposed under mandatory minimums, was meant to foreclose discretion where it could be misused. Now we have judges, armed with politics and casebooks, reopening the doors that were deliberately closed.

Of course, the progressive reply is predictable. They argue that mandatory sentencing over-penalized nonviolent offenders, particularly minorities. That claim deserves scrutiny. The best studies show that racial disparities in sentencing persisted even under fixed penalties, suggesting that bias resides deeper than the statute books. But even if that critique holds, it is not a warrant for anarchy. The correction to excessive punishment is not non-punishment.

Here the comparison is revealing. In the 1980s, a single case like Willie Horton helped galvanize national reform. Horton, released on furlough in Massachusetts, committed rape and assault while on release. His story became the poster child for what happens when rehabilitation is given priority over public safety. Now, we have entire jurisdictions structured around the Horton model. But today’s leniency is not a bug. It is the blueprint.

Some defenders insist that crime trends are complex. They are right. But complexity is not an excuse for passivity. It is precisely because crime has many causes that we must control the ones we can. The deterrent effect of certain and swift punishment is well-established. When prosecutors publicly refuse to prosecute, or when judges hand out light sentences in the name of equity, the public absorbs a simple message: crime is permitted.

This perception, whether accurate in every case or not, is behaviorally real. People respond not to spreadsheets, but to norms. When a subway passenger watches someone violently resist arrest, only to be released hours later, it communicates something. When a shopkeeper sees the same thief return every week, knowing prosecutors will not act, it becomes clear. The law exists, but only in theory.

What legislators tried to fix in the 1980s and 1990s was not perfect. But it was preferable to today’s descent into prosecutorial nullification. That reform era stemmed from a sober judgment: that justice must be consistent, not contingent. The opponents of that principle have found their workaround. They no longer campaign to change the law. They campaign to change the people who enforce it.

If mandatory minimums sought to eliminate judicial favoritism, progressive prosecutors have reinstated it wholesale. If three-strikes laws tried to prevent repeat offenders from gaming the system, today’s DAs give them the keys. If uniform sentencing was meant to ensure that justice did not depend on ideology, we now have a justice system run by ideologues.

The deeper tragedy is that these experiments always fail the same people they claim to help. Violent crime in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago disproportionately impacts Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. It is not the elites funding Krasner’s campaign who suffer from gun violence. It is the working-class families left to endure it. And when justice becomes optional, the lawless do not suffer. The law-abiding do.

We should not forget what prompted the tough-on-crime reforms of the past. They were not capricious. They were not cynical. They were a response to a system that had allowed chaos to masquerade as compassion. We are seeing that cycle again.

Darian McWoods will walk free. The law he broke still exists. But the people entrusted to uphold it have changed. That is the story of our cities. That is the legacy of the Soros prosecutor movement.

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