‘Whatever word games the bill’s proponents use will make no difference to the future victims of these felons…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) A North Carolina felon released under the Trump administration’s First Step Act is back behind bars after he was caught trafficking thousands of dollars of meth.
Troy Powell was sentenced to 20 years for drug offenses back in 2004. Under President Donald Trump’s new criminal justice reform, Powell and thousands of others were given a second chance.
Trump even invited Powell to the White House to celebrate the First Step Act’s ability to change lives.
Less than one year later, Powell was arrested once again, according to WSOC-TV.
This isn’t the first time this has happened since the legislation went into effect. Late last year, another drug offender was released under the First Step Act and then rearrested for murder.
Joel Francisco, a convicted crack dealer, had reportedly made “significant efforts toward post-conviction rehabilitation” while in prison, so he became one of the first federal prisoners to walk free as a result of Trump’s legislation. A few months later, he had stabbed to death 46-year-old Troy Pine in Providence, Rhode Island, according to CNN.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., warned Trump and his Republican colleagues that loosening criminal justice restrictions would have disastrous consequences.
“Let there be no doubt: If the bill is passed, thousands of federal offenders, including violent felons and sex offenders, will be released earlier than they would be under current law,” Cotton wrote in an opinion piece for National Review in November 2018.
“Whatever word games the bill’s proponents use will make no difference to the future victims of these felons,” he added.
Cotton warned that the criminals released under the First Step Act didn’t just commit “low-level, non-violent crimes.”
“There are dozens of other serious violent crimes, including sex-related offenses, that are missing from the bill’s exclusion list,” he explained. “Most important, when there are manifest injustices in individual cases, the proper course of justice is not to simply let out thousands of serious felons.”