On Wednesday, Red State posted an article about the sentencing of Montez Lee, a Black Lives Matter protester who set fire to a pawn shop after looting it in May 2020. The owner of the pawn shop was trapped in the blaze and died of smoke inhalation, leaving behind five children. Mr. Lee had a long criminal record, but his sentence does not reflect that record.
Red State reports:
Given that Lee had a long criminal history, you would think a harsh sentence would be in order. Instead, the DOJ turned into his biggest advocate.
Here’s what the government’s sentencing memo to the judge stated.
Mr. Lee credibly states that he was in the streets to protest unlawful police violence against black men, and there is no basis to disbelieve this statement. Mr. Lee, appropriately, acknowledges that he “could have demonstrated in a different way,” but that he was “caught up in the fury of the mob after living as a black man watching his peers suffer at the hands of police.” As anyone watching the news world-wide knows, many other people in Minnesota were similarly caught up. There appear to have been many people in those days looking only to exploit the chaos and disorder in the interest of personal gain or random violence. There appear also to have been many people who felt angry, frustrated, and disenfranchised, and who were attempting, in many cases in an unacceptably reckless and dangerous manner, to give voice to those feelings. Mr. Lee appears to be squarely in this latter category. And even the great American advocate for non-violence and social justice, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stated in an interview with CBS’s Mike Wallace in 1966 that “we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
The article also notes:
On Tuesday, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the unrest on January 6th. Convicted of seditious conspiracy, Tarrio, who was not present at the Capitol, pleaded for leniency but received none.
How does any of this make sense?