Arsonist Who Murdered Father of 5 Got Reduced Sentence. You're Not Going to Believe Why

An arsonist who murdered a father of five during the George Floyd riots was given a reduced sentence after the federal prosecutor in Minnesota asked the judge for leniency because of the arsonist’s “legitimate frustration with the criminal justice system,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.

For some Republican members of Congress, the 12-year sentence suggested by prosecutors, when guidelines called for 20 years, proved too much to accept.

The arsonist, 26-year-old Montez Terriel Lee, tried to claim he didn’t intend to hurt anyone. But it was the prosecutor’s reasoning that strikes any reasonable person as ludicrous.

“Mr. Lee was terribly misguided, and his actions had tragic, unthinkable consequences. But he appears to have believed that he was, in Dr. King’s eloquent words, engaging in ‘the language of the unheard,'” the memo reads.

Huh?

Mr. Lee’s motive for setting the fire is a foremost issue. 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.”

The sentencing memo actually excuses the crime as an act of “giving voice” to those “who felt angry, frustrated, and disenfranchised.”

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 toexploit the chaos and disorder in the interests of personal gain or random violence. Thereappear also to have been many people who felt angry, frustrated, and disenfranchised, andwho were attempting, in many cases in an unacceptably reckless and dangerous manner, togive voice to those feelings.

He wasn’t “giving voice” to anyone. He was burning buildings to the ground.

Actually, it’s a good basis for a defense of the actions of the Jan. 6 defendants. They were only “giving voice” to those who were “angry, frustrated, and disenfranchised” by the election. Perhaps the federal judge hearing the case and the federal prosecutors trying the case will hear and understand the “language of the unheard” and go easy on the rioters.

In the end, the judge understood the “language of the unheard” and sentenced Lee to 10 years instead of 12.

The judge in the case is Wilhelmina Wright, who has been mentioned prominently as a candidate to replace Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.