Would Kamala Harris Have Kept the Nashville Shooter Out of Prison?
Vice President Kamala Harris has commenced her nascent presidential campaign with a $50 million ad campaign presenting the candidate as a “fearless” prosecutor who “put murderers and abusers behind bars.” But according to the website from her last presidential campaign, her tough-on-crime rhetoric has a significant loophole: She’s committed to doing all she can to prevent criminals who identify as transgender from ever setting foot in prison.
Despite her reinvention as the female Rudy Giuliani, Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign website indicts, not criminals, but the supposedly bigoted American system. “Our criminal justice system is deeply flawed, infected with bias, and in urgent need of reform,” said her website. “That’s why Kamala became a prosecutor: to be a voice for people who needed an advocate and to make changes to the system from within.” (That’s quite an admission in itself.) Her campaign pledged to begin incentivizing “states to significantly reform or end the cash bail system,” as well as enacting policies that “re-envision public safety” (a code phrase for defunding the police) and “drastically limiting the number of people we expose to our criminal justice system.”
When Harris unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019-2020, she sought to give people who identify as transgender a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Her website recounted the troubles of trans-identifying inmates before stating, “Kamala understands the best way to address the issue is to seek alternatives to incarceration to prevent trans individuals from being incarcerated in the first place. Kamala would also push to significantly reform our sentencing laws to further reduce sentences.”
Of course, exempting people from prison due to their membership in a discreet group violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. But successive waves of administrations, of both parties, have ignored the constitutional limitations of government. When confronted with a legal roadblock to his plans, the current president defiantly says, “Watch me.”
Suppose a President Kamala Harris takes her hand off the Bible next January and hears of a trans-identifying school shooter such as Audrey Hale. Her private notebooks show that Hale, the 28-year-old who murdered six people in a Christian school in Nashville last March, went by the male name “Aiden” on the day of her death and believed dying in a blaze of glory would allow her to be reborn with a male body that would attract dark-skinned girls in Heaven. Although Hale perished in the shooting, suppose she had lived. Would Harris take any special measures to assure Hale’s comfort? It is not as out-of-the-question as it may seem. Days after the shooting, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre expressed her heartfelt sympathy, for LGBTQ activists. “Our hearts go out to those of the trans community as they are under attack right now,” she said. The Biden-Harris administration has implemented policies that, if trans-identifying people must go to jail, they go to the prison of their chosen gender: Males go to female prisons and vice-versa.
What about someone like “Julia Grace Egler”? The16-year-old Florida male, who identifies as female, allegedly murdered his mother, 38-year-old Kelley McCollom, because she did not approve of his transgender transition. “Egler cited long-standing conflicts with her mother, including disagreements related to her gender transition, as well as disapproval of her mother’s relationship with [22-year-old boyfriend, Matthew] Szejnrok, as motives for the crime,” said Palm Bay Police Lieutenant Virginia Kilmer.
Yet the 16-year-old reportedly transitioned at least as early as 2015, apparently no later than the age of seven. And police say the mother’s social media posts seemed uniformly supportive of the transition, referring to Elger as “my daughter.”
“Welcome home,” Egler told his mother before opening fire with a .38 caliber revolver, killing her on the evening of July 6. He ran out of bullets and attempted to stab Szejnrok to death before adding an extra bullet and shooting the man in the head, purportedly after the victim made a plea for death. He now faces two counts of first-degree murder, as well as possibly being tried as an adult.
How would Harris deal with a 28-year-old trans-identifying man who changed his name from Collin to Mia Bailey? Bailey killed his parents — Joseph, 70, Gail, 69 — and shot at his brother this summer in Washington, Utah. He, too, cited a strained relationship with those relatives and others in his family. Yet he has expressed no remorse, “I would do it again. I hate them,” Bailey told police. He now faces 11 felonies.
This is but the tip of a criminal iceberg. The Dallas Express recounts other trans-identifying criminals, including:
“Anderson Lee Aldrich, a biological male who identified as nonbinary, killed five people at an LGBTQ club in Colorado in 2022.
“Maya McKinney, a biological female who identified as a man, killed one person at a Denver area charter school in 2019. Eight others were injured in the incident.
“Snochia Moseley, a biological female who identified as a man, killed three people outside a Maryland warehouse in 2018.”
Whatever Harris would do, her stated policy of trying to exempt one class of people from prison betrays a soft-on-crime ideology. Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) has pointed out that Harris had time to write a letter congratulating social media “influencer” and Bud Light destroyer Dylan Mulvaney on his transforming his self-image from an adult male to an underage girl, yet said nothing about the victims of criminal aliens. “I send you my warmest greetings as you celebrate your 365th day of living authentically,” Harris, the sitting vice president of the United States, wrote to the transgender idol last year.
At the same time, Harris has not uttered the name of Laken Riley or others murdered by illegal immigrant gangs. She has expressed little sympathy for those killed by the fentanyl crisis the Biden-Harris administration open-borders policies have created. One might call such priorities, for lack of a better word, “weird.”
Harris’s preferential transgender amnesty policy also signals her core commitment to codifying a two-tiered justice system. The Biden-Harris administration has meted out year-long jail sentences to elderly pro-life grandmothers and peaceful demonstrators, while exempting convicted criminals who are part of the Left’s “Coalition of the Ascendant” from the consequences of their anti-social actions.
What consequences will that inflict on America in a Harris administration?
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.