A prosecutor in Chicago decided to water down murder and attempted murder charges to firearm violations in the case of Juan Ferba, who reportedly fired up to 14 rounds at a South Side street corner. According to prosecutors, the gunfire arose from a dispute between Ferba and an unnamed man. Both men had pulled out their guns.
A "reform-minded" Chicago prosecutor dropped murder charges against a felon who killed one person and wounded another in a shootout.
Kim Foxx is one of the so-called criminal justice reform prosecutors boosted by George Soros.
Via @jchristenson_ https://t.co/ymStiVBTkh
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) January 20, 2023
Ferba delivered fatal shots to the man thrice in the head, per authorities. A woman on a bus close to the scene also got struck in the hand. These victims led to Ferba’s arrest last week, with Chicago police charging him with murder and attempted murder.
However, the office of Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx (D.) threw out the murder and attempted murder charges and replaced them with illegal possession of a firearm. The firearm, prosecutors claimed, he had used in self-defense.
While the motivation behind Foxx’s action is apparent in the light of her participation in a so-called criminal justice reform, it is unjustifiable as the crime is apparently not a one-off for Ferba. A pre-trial public safety assessment conducted on him pegged his chances of committing another crime at four out of six.
Court records also show that he has served time for a violent felony conviction before this recent incident.
This would not be the first time Foxx would go soft on crime as Chicago continues to experience a rise in crime rate. According to the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund Jason Johnson, she has quite a reputation for dropping felony cases, including and especially felonies involving gun abuse and violence.
“While it’s appalling, it’s unsurprising that a radical D.A. like Kim Foxx would give leniency to a convicted felon committing violence with an illegal gun because she’s done it over and over again,” Johnson said.
Johnson cited a case from 2021 in which a seven-year-old girl had been killed and her six-year-old sister injured. Foxx’s office had rejected murder charges against the suspect with flimsy excuses, causing a dispute between her office and the police, who wanted to pursue the suspect to the full extent of the law.
She also allegedly refused to bring charges against a killer who had confessed to the crime.
Since her election in 2016, Foxx has pushed vehemently for criminal reform, including bail reform. Critics have said that her approach would only succeed at increasing the rate of violent crimes in Chicago as her policies tilt the scales in favor of criminals.
Fellow attorneys also seem to not be in support of her moves, according to a Daily Mail report which revealed that her policies cost her office more than 230 prosecutors from July 2021 to October 2022. A former colleague had tagged her performance as DA an “abysmal failure.”
