Horowitz: Violent criminal released by New Hampshire judge accused of brutally raping woman in cemetery six days later

These are the victim stories that are never told by politicians. These are the criminals who need to be locked up but are increasingly let out on the streets because criminal justice reform is all about the criminal, not the victim.

Amuri Diole represents everything that is wrong with our justice system. He was arrested on April 29 for allegedly assaulting a woman in a Manchester, New Hampshire, cemetery for two hours, smashing her head on a grave marker, raping her, putting a knife to her neck, and threatening to kill her. Like almost every one of these heinous criminal acts, this one was allegedly committed by a man who was incorrigibly violent and should never have been on the streets but was indeed released just six days before.

According to the Manchester Union Leader, Diole was arrested in November 2018 for reportedly brutally beating a man in Merrimack who was nice enough to employ him, despite his troubled background. During the attack, Diole allegedly broke the nose, jaw, and eye sockets of his victim. Despite five years of cycling in and out of psychiatric hospitals and being diagnosed with homicidal tendencies, Diole was not kept off the streets even after this demonic assault. He was in and out of jail since 2018, racking up more criminal arrests. Over a year later, the victim of the assault still had not gotten justice, and in January, Superior Court Judge Charles Temple ruled that Diole was incompetent to stand trial.

Freeze frame at this point. One would think that the alternative to going to prison would be locking this man up in a psychiatric institute. After all, if someone is so violent that he can't control himself, he is even more dangerous on the streets than the non-mentally ill criminals. Yet our system now uses the criminal's mental status as an excuse to simply release him. This is happening throughout the country. In this case, Diole was released from jail on April 23. The judge cited state law that gives prosecutors 90 days to obtain an order for involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital, something that is becoming very hard given that most psychiatrists are leftists and are unwilling to commit criminals.

Well, this unnamed female victim wasn't given 90 days to prepare to be raped. Nor was the victim of the previous crime for which Diore never stood trial informed of his release. The victim in the Merrimack assault told the Union Leader that he was not surprised Diole never left the cemetery after last week's alleged rape. "He's not afraid of consequences. He's not remorseful. Everyone who knows Amuri knows he's dangerous," he said.

And that is the hallmark of our criminal justice system.

According to court documents, Diole moved to the United States from Congo about 17 years ago at age 10 and lived a troubled life beginning in his teen years. It's unclear whether his family came over as refugees, but most immigrants from Congo over the past two decades have been resettled under the refugee program, many of them in New England.

The question everyone should be asking is why Republicans are not running on plugging all the loopholes that allow repeat criminals to escape justice and needlessly victimize others? The original term "criminal justice reform" was coined by Ronald Reagan to promote an agenda on behalf of victims of crime to ensure the bad guys are taken off the streets. He described it as an effort to "protect the innocent and put the professional criminals in jail where they belong." One of Reagan's particular priorities was ensuring that the criminally insane are not let back on the streets. How many Republicans ever discuss our under-incarceration problem?

The reality is that it's not only drug dealers — themselves most often violent and committing other crimes — who are escaping justice in this pro-criminal environment. Violent criminals are rarely punished commensurately with their crimes. At a time when the government claims to have zero tolerance for insurrection, federal prosecutors from Oregon dropped charges or are expected to drop charges on all but seven of the 97 Portland rioters arrested on federal charges. Remember, these are some of the worst offenders out of the thousands of rioters, riots that included attacks on a federal courthouse and involved the blinding of DHS agents with lasers. Only one individual is headed to prison for any amount of time. All charges of assault against federal agents for the remaining individuals, including one suspect accused of placing an agent in a chokehold, were dropped.

But this favoritism is not only for people beating and burning under the sacred banner of Black Lives Matter; it's for general criminals as well. Crime victim advocates in Minnesota recently pointed to a case of a man convicted a little more than a year ago for stomping someone to the point of great bodily harm, yet his 117-month sentence was stayed:

Again, these cases are not the exception, but the rule. We now learn that Demond Goudy, the suspect in the murder of 7-year-old Jaslyn Adams at a Chicago McDonald's drive-through last month, was out on bond for four separate felony cases.

One GOP governor after another sheds crocodile tears over giving criminals a "second chance," but so many of them have dozens of chances and still serve little or no time. As my TheBlaze colleague, Sarah Taylor, recently reported, the suspect charged in the brutal stomping murder of Maryland police officer Keith Heacock in Delmar, Delaware, accrued 38 prior arrests in just a decade but doesn't appear to have served much time in prison. To this day, Biden has failed to mention a word about Officer Heacock and this terrible travesty that occurred in his home state.

Then there are criminal aliens. We like importing other countries' criminals and won't even throw the book at them. Despite having two prior arrests, Jesus Leal-Corona was never deported. In 2019, he killed 24-year-old Frankie Hensley while driving drunk in New Jersey. Breitbart reports that he was sentenced to just five years in prison. By the time the system is done with him, it would be surprising if he doesn't get out much earlier and remain in the country indefinitely.

I began focusing on public affairs as a kid during the peak of the last crime wave in the early 1990s. I watched the citizens rise up and demand action, a call that was largely heeded by both parties, including the current president. Now, we can hardly find a self-described conservative willing to hold the line on violent crime. That's a testament to the success of the left in moving the Overton window so far from the values of our grandparents.