Crack dealer released early gets death penalty for killing three

President Obama has made it clear that one of the priorities of his final year in office will becriminal justice reform. Last summer, he became the first sitting president to visit a federalprison, theEl Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma, where he granted clemency to dozens of non-violent inmates.

Dozens is nothing. When new retroactivefederal sentencing reductions went into effect last fall, more than 6,000 non-violent drug offenders were released. As the president explained, too many non-violent offenders were locked up, andtheir makeup was “disproportionately black and Latino.”

Judicial Watch reports today that one non-violent drug offender who benefited from early release, 35-year-old Wendell Callahan, now faces the death penalty for fatally stabbinghis ex-girlfriend and her two children, ages 7 and 10, “to eliminate them as witnesses” to their mother’s murder.

Judicial Watch reports:

Callahan should have been in jail when the crimes occurred, but he was released four years early because federal sentencing guidelines for crack dealers got reduced. The change is part of President Obamas effort to reform the nations justice system as a way of ending racial discrimination. The initiative was technically launched back in 2010 when the president signed a measure that for the first time in decades relaxed drug-crime sentences he claimed discriminated against poor and minority offenders. This severely weakened a decades-old law enacted during the infamous crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged urban communities nationwide in the 1980s. As part of the movement the U.S. Sentencing Commission lowered maximum sentences for drug offenders and made it retroactive, leading to the early release of thousands of violent thugs like Callahan.

Here are some older tweets to provide context.

This week, a grand jury returned a 10-count indictment against Callahan which calls for the death penalty unless someone intervenes and commutes his sentence.

Is anyone else reminded of the consequences of San Francisco’s compassionate“sanctuary city” policy for the late Kate Steinle?