“A Minor Adjustment”

That’s how resident lefty Chris Fitzsimon described the changes to the sentencing grid that I point out in my blog post yesterday.

Apparently, he feels that giving future child rapists a 16% reduction in their prison sentences is just “a minor adjustment.”  I wonder how the victims of the crimes, that he seems to make light of, feel about the changes.  Indeed, I wonder if he would still feel the same way if one of these crimes happened to his family.

Second, Fizsimon continues to falsely state that these changes were supported by the sentencing commission.  They most certainly were not.  If you read the report, on page 2 it very clearly states:

These are alternatives presented for consideration by the General Assembly, not necessarily recommendations by the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission.

There’s a key word there — alternatives.  The sentencing commission gave the General Assembly a list of alternatives to choose from and it is up to the General Assembly, in its responsibility, to decide which alternatives it chooses to adopt.

The General Assembly could have very well chosen that it is more important to spend taxpayer dollars keeping violent, recidivist felons in prison rather than reducing their sentences, but they chose not to.  They’d rather reduce the sentences of rapists and murderers so they could spend $25 million on a fishing pier.