Trump strikes a blow against the anti-police crowd with pardons for two D.C. cops

As we have seen this month, a president’s unconstrained power to grant clemency tempts abuse. If the abuse becomes widespread, it can undermine the rule of law.

At the same time, we should remember that, used judiciously, the pardon power can correct injustices that our fallible system produces.

Such is the case with the pardons President Trump granted yesterday to two Washington, D.C. policemen. They correct a manifest injustice that occurred during the height of George Floyd fever and the BLM-inspired “racial reckoning.”

The policemen are Officer Terence Sutton and Lt. Andrew Zabavsky. On October 23, 2020, Sutton, while on duty, received information from another officer that Karon Hylton-Brown had been involved in an altercation earlier in the day. Hylton-Brown was a gang member whom Sutton knew had a lengthy criminal history.

Sutton believed the altercation involving Hylton-Brown was with a rival gang member over money owed to Hylton-Brown. He believed Hylton-Brown was seeking to retaliate against the rival.

Sutton located Hylton-Brown as he was operating a motorized scooter illegally on a sidewalk without a helmet. Sutton attempted to stop Hylton-Brown by activating his emergency lights.

Hylton-Brown fled on the scooter. After attempting to evade police for about three minutes, he drove through an alley, failed to yield the right-of-way, and was struck by a civilian vehicle. After several days in the hospital, Hylton-Brown died from injuries sustained in the crash.

The Biden Justice Department prosecuted Officer Sutton. A jury found him guilty of second-degree murder, conspiracy to obstruct, and obstruction of justice. He was sentenced to 66 months in prison.

The obstruction charges stemmed from an agreement between Sutton and Lt. Zabavsky, who arrived at the scene of the accident, to hide from police officials the circumstances of the crash leading to Hylton-Brown’s death. Zabavsky was sentenced to 48 months in prison. Both were out of jail pending the appeal of their convictions.

The prosecution of Sutton and Zabavsky was ridiculous. It is best explained as part of the temporary (I hope) insanity that gripped America after George Floyd’s mistreatment and death in Minneapolis a few months before Hylton-Brown’s death. That, plus grandstanding by the Biden Justice Department.

Former D.C. police chief Peter Newsham, who was head of the department when Hylton-Brown was killed, said the officers never should have been charged. He stated:

For them [the Biden DOJ] to pursue a police officer under these circumstances is unjust. It’s the most unjust thing I’ve seen in my career dating to 1989.

I have all the sympathy in the world for [Hylton-Brown’s] mom.” But the people in the Justice Department are supposed to be law enforcement folks. How they can say a charge and a conviction for murder is okay? It boggles my mind.

Newsham has said all along that the two cops violated procedure with their post-accident conduct at the scene of Hylton-Brown’s crash. But there are administrative processes for handling such violations. Newsham is clear, as the quotation shows, that criminal prosecution was unprecedented and unwarranted.

Current D.C. police chief Pamela Smith agrees:

[These prosecutions] were literally unprecedented. Never before, in any other jurisdiction in the country, has a police officer been charged with second-degree murder for pursuing a suspect. These members could never have imagined that engaging in a core function of their job would be prosecuted as a crime.

Exactly. Hylton-Brown died because (1) he chose to flee from Officer Sutton, rather than to comply with a proper order to stop and (2) he recklessly drove into an oncoming vehicle.

Shifting the blame to an officer trying to do his job is pro-criminal and anti-police. It fits the BLM/defund-the-police narrative, but is inconsistent with common sense and a decent regard for law enforcement.

For once, I agree with left-winger Patrice Sulton, a criminal justice reform advocate and executive director of the DC Justice Lab. She says: “Pardons are a way to send a message about our values.”

The message these pardons send is that we value police officers who try to do their job. We don’t consider them criminals when an unfortunate combination of reckless behavior by a suspect and bad luck leads to injury or death.

Ed Martin, D.C.’s interim U.S. Attorney put the message more bluntly:

Hear me loud and clear: we will stand with the Blue against the thugs and scum who terrorize DC. Today, I spoke with the MPD chief of police 3 times about protecting the Blue. Under Biden, they chose politics over police. I choose police.

The Washington Post says (in its paper version of the story) that these two pardons “stem the tide that had been turning toward holding the police accountable.” The pardons do help stem the tide brought on by George Floyd madness and a Justice Department that’s ambivalent at best about the police. But they don’t turn it against holding police officers criminally accountable when they commit real crimes.

Even the Post’s liberal readers seem to grasp this. The comments to its article, often accompanied by expressions of dislike for Trump, mostly favor the pardons. This comment was typical:

Not a Trump fan. But I’m behind him on this. Backing our police will hopefully bring down crime in DC which the extreme policies of the [city] council enabled.

There was also this:

[Sutton was not allowed to [testify] was that [Hylton-Brown] threatened to kill someone on the street that day. He had also dragged his baby momma down the street by her hair just before his death. He was anything but a good person. I know a lot of people on Kennedy St. who are happy he is gone and that most of KDY crew got locked up after the FBI and IRS got involved.

Even many liberals are sick of viewing thugs as victims and police officers as villains. Couple this with the successful war on DEI, and it seems clear that America’s BLM-inspired “racial reckoning” is facing a reckoning of its own.