patrick.net

... Weed was beaten to death over $1.

The Frederick County Circuit Court placed on probation the younger of the two brothers and ordered him to complete an anger management program. The older brother pleaded guilty to second-degree assault for spitting on Weed after he had fallen, but a second assault charge was dropped. Because they are both under 18, prosecutors argued they should be tried as adults. Two motions to move each case to adult court were denied. ...

As five-year-old Cannon Hinnant rode his bicycle, Darius Sessoms approached him, produced a gun, and shot him in the head, according to eyewitnesses. Sessoms killed Hinnant as he played in the front yard of his father’s home with his two sisters, seven and eight years old. ‘My first reaction was he’s playing with the kids,’ said Doris Lybrand, a neighbor who witnessed the shooting through the window of her home. ‘For a second, I thought, “That couldn’t happen.” People don’t run across the street and kill kids.’ But to her and the Hinnant family’s horror, it did happen.

The Hinnant family is inconsolable. They are also angry at the lack of attention the killing received, compared to what followed George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis: a deluge of media coverage and political oratory, protests, and policy proposals. ‘We expect the same outrage about him as an innocent child as you have about all of the George Floyds, and all of these other people,’ Cannon’s grandmother, Gwen Hinnant, told me. The dynamics in Maryland were the same. Weed was white, his assailants were black, and the incident also received little attention.

Most importantly, both cases highlight the fundamental problem of crime and punishment today: we proceed from the belief that America suffers from over-incarceration. In this view, Weed’s killers must receive clemency, lest we enlarge the stain of mass incarceration. But that’s hardly true. Sessoms, for example, had two pending counts of felony maintaining a vehicle, dwelling or place for a controlled substance in Wilson County, and a rap sheet mapped across several counties. Had he been incapacitated behind bars, Cannon would be alive.

Most of what Americans have been told about mass incarceration is untrue, or takes half-truths and tortures them into whole lies. ...

As the Hinnant and Weed families mourn, however, a question remains. When Democrats and Republicans seem enthralled or cowed by the zeitgeist of reform, who will fight to keep communities safe?