Mother of Homicide Victim Takes Judiciary Dems to Task for Talking Politics during NYC Crime Hearing
On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing in Manhattan to allow those affected by violent crime the chance to tell their stories and discuss whether District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s policies are worsening crime in their city.
Committee members were at loggerheads about the propriety of the hearing and why New York City had been chosen, with Representative Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) asserting that the selecting the borough of Manhattan in the city of New York was for one reason only: “The GOP leadership in Congress doing what it has done best for the last 6 years, and that is act as the criminal defense counsel for Donald J. Trump.”
Trump has been accused by Bragg of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. In a wide-ranging speech after he pleaded not guilty, the former president accused Bragg of pursuing a politically motivated prosecution. The same charge has been leveled against Bragg by Republicans including Jim Jordan (R. Ohio), the Judiciary Committee’s chairman.
Both Republicans and some of the witnesses called to speak in front of the committee took issue with the characterization of the Monday hearing as political.
Madeline Brame, chairwoman of the Victims Rights Reform Council and the mother of a homicide victim, explained that she doesn’t “hear anyone talking about politics or Trump except for the other side,” referring to the Democrats on the committee.
“Victims can care less about anyone’s political ideology or party. Neither do criminals. They don’t roll up to a person and ask them if they’re a Democrat or a Republican before they bust them in the head, or before they push them in front of the train, or before they stab them to death,” Brame explained.
Brame’s son, Sergeant Hassan Korea, was assaulted by a gang and stabbed by four people he did not know in an incident caught on video, according to Brame’s written testimony.
Brame claimed the prosecution of the individuals who killed her son was mishandled by district attorney Alvin Bragg. Brame said that during Bragg’s tenure, she had been told by an assistant district attorney that the DA’s office “didn’t have the resources to try all four defendants.”
She added that one of them, Mary Saunders, pleaded guilty to a completely manufactured charge of assault with a shoe and sentenced to one year time served. Another perpetrator, Travis Stewart, pleaded guilty to attempted gang assault and was sentenced to seven years only because of his priors. “None of the circumstances changed surrounding the brutal, savage butchering of my son. The only thing that changed was the Law and DA Alvin Bragg,” Brame wrote.
The victims-rights advocate also waved away crime statistics brought up by some committee members, saying “the average New Yorker doesn’t care about any statistic…We care about the mothers who have to visit the morgue to identify their dead’s child body.”
Jordan zeroed in on Bragg’s Day One Memo as being at the center of a continuing lack of public safety in New York.
“The policies being implemented by this district attorney are going to ruin this great city,” explained Jordan. “It’s driven by that Day One Memo…that Day One Memo that sent a message to this town to the bad guys in this town: You can do bad things, but you’re not gonna get prosecuted.”
In a statement announcing his Day One Memo, Bragg explained that he would continue to prosecute violent crimes, but avoid prosecuting certain minor offenses that have no impact on public safety, including “marijuana, fare evasion, some trespass cases, driving with 1 or 2 license suspensions, noncriminal offenses such as traffic infractions, resisting arrest for any non-criminal offense, prostitution, and obstructing governmental administration.”
Regarding robberies, the memo instructed assistant district attorneys “to make a common-sense difference between two very different types of cases: a person holding a knife to someone’s neck, and someone who, usually struggling with substance use or mental health issues, shoplifts and makes a minimal threat to a store employee while leaving.”
One of the witnesses, Robert Holden, a Democratic Member of the New York City Council from Queens, said during the hearing that these small crimes contribute to a lack of public safety in the city.
“I’ve had so many friends leaving this town. They just see the quality of life dropping they go out on the street, there’s people driving down the wrong way…There’s people robbing stores. You know all the pharmacies in New York have to be under lock and key. It’s so bad, these small crimes,” Holden said, arguing that Bragg’s soft-on-crime message should never have been broadcast to criminals.
Holden added that his family won’t take the subway anymore due to how unsafe it’s become and cited statistics that there’s been an increase in the seven major crimes recently.
“We fought so hard in the 90s to stop this crime wave that we had in New York City and we did it,” said Holden, “but now it’s being rolled back to the good old days.”
Republicans on the committee also zeroed in on New York’s gun laws and whether they are making the city safer.
Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) pointed out that several of the victims brought up by the committee’s witnesses were stabbed to death. He asked one of the witnesses whether knives kill.
“Where there’s a will there’s a way and if evil wants to attack, evil is going to attack,” said Jennifer Harrison, founder of Victims Rights NY, whose boyfriend was stabbed to death.
“New York might have strict gun laws, but it also have conflicting gun laws,” she explained, adding that “all they want to do is talk about gun legislation on the books, but if it’s not enforced, which is what Alvin Bragg is doing, then it’s not going to matter and people are going to die.”
Barry Borgen, another witness and father of a victim of an anti-Semitic hate crime, said “criminals will get guns either way. It’s not going to change.”
Democrats reiterated their view throughout that the hearing was highly political. “This committee has used every means at its disposal to disrupt, interrupt, and interfere with the prosecution” of Donald Trump, explained Schiff, adding that the hearing is “a vain attempt to intimate or embarrass the prosecutorial authority.”
Representative Mike Johnson (R., Ohio) defended the hearing on the grounds New York City is one of the most egregious examples in America of crime and soft-on-crime policies.
Jordan asserted that New York City is only where the committee is starting its series of field hearings on crime.
“We’re going to have other hearings. We’re going to go wherever we need to go,” Jordan said.
“Yes, we could be having this in Los Angeles. Yes, we could be having this in San Francisco. There are other places around the country in which, systematically, district attorneys are not enforcing the laws and leading to the kind of terrible stories we’re hearing here today,” explained Issa.
