New York City’s Assault on Self-Defense
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/new-york-citys-assault-on-self-defense/
Alvin Bragg, one of the contemptible squad of George Soros-backed urban district attorneys who stormed into office vowing to radically rework the justice system, is proving as good as his word. New York City’s historic crime problem, which was under control as recently as three years ago, is continuing to get worse as the first-year New York County DA sends all of the wrong signals. His latest outrage is to charge a Manhattan bodega worker with murder after he defended himself against an attacker.
Bodegas — small grocery stores strongly associated with hard-working immigrants — can be dangerous places, particularly at night, and police can be slow to respond. Yet the city has for decades made it almost impossible to obtain a license to legally carry a firearm. Jose Alba, a 61-year-old U.S. citizen who emigrated from the Dominican Republic and works at the Blue Moon store on upper Broadway in Harlem, had a knife behind the counter, and was forced to use it against Austin Simon, 35. Simon entered the store in a rage after Simon’s girlfriend tried to buy a bag of chips with an EBT card and the card was declined. As shown in surveillance radio, Simon stormed behind the register and attacked Alba. Alba then stabbed Simon at least five times, fatally, at which point the girlfriend attacked and stabbed the bodega worker. (She hasn’t been charged at all.)
Alba clearly acted in self-defense and should have been charged with nothing. Moreover, Simon was a career criminal who had at least eight prior arrests on such charges as assault and robbery, and was on parole for assaulting a police officer. Yet Bragg brought the harshest imaginable charge against Alba, second-degree murder, and initially held him on an excessive bail of $250,000, which was reduced to $50,000 after a community outcry. Bodega workers and the New York Post have taken up Alba’s case as a cause celèbre, and because there is no recall mechanism in the state to threaten Bragg’s job, Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin has renewed his vows to simply remove Bragg from office on grounds, by now well-supported, that Bragg is not applying the law. Even a (failed) Democratic candidate for governor and member of Congress, Representative Tom Suozzi, has supported this unusual maneuver.
Bragg is a disgrace, the biggest threat to law and order in Manhattan in decades. The unjust prosecution of Alba is merely the latest example of how recentering the justice system around “equity” amounts to coddling career criminals at the expense of upstanding citizens such as Alba. In a one-party city, Bragg effectively won his office when he secured the Democratic Party’s nomination last June with just 85,000 votes, a margin of only 9,000 over his nearest challenger. Unless Zeldin this fall upsets the liberal Democratic governor Kathy Hochul, who is unlikely to do anything about Bragg except make a few concerned noises, New Yorkers are going to suffer for at least three and a half more years from the disastrous consequences of not bothering to stop Bragg in that low-turnout primary election last summer.
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