Leave Him There

They're still trying to get Hoover out of a life sentence:

• The notorious co-founder of the Gangster Disciples street gang sat with his hands shackled in his lap Thursday, listening from a thousand miles away, as a judge in Chicago asked the question that could lie at the heart of whether he grants mercy to Larry Hoover after 26 years.

  “How many murders is he responsible for?” U.S. District Judge John Blakey asked.

  The judge directed his question to Hoover’s defense attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, who had just argued that Hoover’s once-monolithic gang is now a “splintered, disorganized group with no hierarchy,” and that prosecutors simply feed the “mythology” of Hoover to keep him locked up.

Behind that supposed "mythology" is a charismatic SOB who could rally the splintered group into the force it was in its heyday. Even after his initial conviction and sentence of 150 years, he was running the gang from Illinois prisons before federal wiretaps got him sent to Colorado's SuperMax prison. That was the only thing that separated him from the driver's seat of his criminal network.

Society shouldn't be willing to take that risk. Hoover can leave when he's dead.