A St. Louis car accident shows just how vile leftist criminal justice policies are

When people ask me whether elections in big Democrat cities are honest, I answer that I hope they’re fixed because, if they’re not, that means that those cities’ residents, surrounded by failure and decay, keep voting for more of the same. One of those “more of the same” trends in leftist cities has been to vote in hard-left Soros-funded prosecutors who refuse to prosecute criminals. Kimberly Gardner, in St. Louis, Missouri, is one such prosecutor, and she’s being charged with responsibility for the fact that a teenager heading to college on an athletic scholarship is now a double amputee, having lost her legs to a violent career criminal.

If the name Kim Gardner is familiar, it’s because she prosecuted Republican Governor Eric Greitens, claiming he had violated someone’s sexual privacy. Because the charges against him, though obviously false, revealed that Greitens was an adulterer, he was still forced to resign. Gardner was charged with an ethics violation but held onto her job.

Gardner wasn’t just trumping up charges to destroy political opponents. Even hard-left-leaning Wikipedia concedes that Gardner has been involved in one scandal after another. The list includes slandering the police and filing a baseless lawsuit charging them with racism, committing campaign finance violations, violating open records laws, persecuting the McCloskey’s for defending their property against BLM protesters, discriminating and retaliating against employees on racial grounds, and violating multiple laws to avoid prosecuting actual criminals. The Missouri Bar Ethics Department has also filed a complaint against her for misconduct.

This post is about one of those prosecutions that Gardner allegedly avoided, making it a classic case of a leftist prosecutor being “kind to the cruel.” According to a statement from Andrew Bailey, Missouri’s Attorney general, a man named Daniel Riley

is a dangerous gunman who should have been in jail. In 2020, the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office charged Riley with First Degree Robbery and Armed Criminal Action for stealing a firearm from a victim at gunpoint. The Circuit Attorney dismissed and refiled that case on July 18, 2022, but not before Riley- who was out on bond- earned 54 separate violations for failing to comply with the pre-trial bond conditions. After the Circuit Attorney refiled the case, Riley earned 50 more violations. The Circuit Attorney never filed a motion to revoke Riley’s bond.

If you’re wondering about those “50 more violations,” they came about because Riley was out of jail house arrest with a tracker on his ankle. He violated the terms of that house arrest 50 times without any consequences. And there’s still more regarding his criminal record: “An investigation by KMOV revealed that Riley had 100 bond violations and never had a driver’s license.”

Kim Gardner from a YouTube screen grab. Daniel Riley from the St. Louis Corrections Division.

On February 18, Riley slammed a car he was driving (illegally) into another car that, in turn, slammed into Janae Edmonson, a pedestrian. Edmonson, 17, is a young woman from Tennessee who was in St. Louis for a volleyball tournament. She is Riley’s opposite, for she was a standout high school volleyball and basketball athlete who had just committed to UT Southern on a volleyball scholarship.

Edmonson was pinned against a parked car and so critically injured that she almost died. It was only because her father had emergency medical training that she survived. At the hospital, she had to have both her legs amputated, one above the knee and one below the knee.

AG Bailey demanded that Gardner, whose office has a 3,000-case backlog, step down immediately or face “removal proceedings in the form of a writ of quo warranto” (a proceeding to challenge Gardner’s right to hold the job). Gardner defended herself by claiming that the St. Louis courts are at fault. The court has stated that it cannot comment on that charge:

22nd Circuit Court spokesman Joel Currier declined comment and said he could not discuss the 2020 robbery case by law because it was a closed case.

However, Riley’s attorney has backed Gardner’s claims, saying that the judge did fail to act on Riley’s bond violations.

Assuming Gardner’s defense is accurate, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve to be fired. She’s been responsible for a prosecutor’s office that is blatantly more interested in targeting those with whom she disagrees politically than in ensuring the safety of St. Louis’s citizens. The truth of her defense means only that the judicial system is also dysfunctional.

Of course, none of the finger-pointing will return Edmonson’s legs to her. She is forever broken thanks to a criminal justice system in a Democrat-run city that is relentlessly kind to the cruel and, therefore, inevitably cruel to the kind. And so, again, I wonder if St. Louis citizens can really be so foolish and cruel that they would keep returning those politicians to power or if elections are predetermined in St. Louis.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/a_st_louis_car_accident_shows_just_how_vile_leftist_criminal_justice_policies_are.html