Federal Charges

CWB has been covering this the CTA attack extensively:

• Article one
• Article two
• Article three

And like the Iryna Zarutska stabbing, the feds grabbed this one:

• After being arrested by Chicago police officers in the Loop on Tuesday morning, the man accused of setting a woman on fire aboard a Blue Line train this week spontaneously yelled “Burn b****!” and “Burn alive b****!” according to a newly filed federal criminal complaint.

  Lawrence Reed, a 50-year-old man on pretrial release for allegedly knocking a psychiatric ward social worker unconscious in August, is federally charged with a terrorist attack or other violence against a mass transportation system.

Federal charges should mean Federal penalties....which include the Death Penalty.

CWB also names the judges who have been lax in keeping this psycho away from the public:

• Reed ultimately pleaded guilty to arson and received two years of “mental health probation” from Judge Arthur Hill. Despite being arrested three times on misdemeanor charges, including twice for battery, while on probation, the court deemed his probation performance “satisfactory” after prosecutors dropped all of those charges.

• On August 19, Reed allegedly knocked a social worker unconscious while he was being treated at MacNeal Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Berwyn, according to court records.

  [...] Despite the allegations, Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez rejected the detention request and ordered Reed released on electronic monitoring rather than being put in jail. While the court clerk’s notes describe the monitoring as “24/7,” a document signed by Molina-Gonzalez shows she authorized him to leave home from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays. The order also barred him from the psychiatric hospital “unless it is a medical emergency.”

• On September 12, court records show Judge Ralph Meczyk modified Reed’s electronic monitoring order to allow him out of his home during some daytime hours on Tuesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

Hats off to CWB for being the first (and maybe only) news outlet to start naming names in an effort to hold judges accountable for endangering the public. If the judges start getting voted out, maybe the politicians will wake up and stop catering to criminals?