Alabama citizens, crime victims deserve real accountability for failures in state Criminal Justice System
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Eye on Politics
Paul DeMarco
This past week Gov. Kay Ivey announced that the State of Alabama would pay the family of slain Bibb County Deputy Brad Johnson $1 million.
The governor made it clear the payment was because of fundamental flaws in the state’s correctional incentives “good time” law that allows felons an early release from prison.
In this case, the suspect, Austin Patrick Hall, had a lengthy criminal history, including for violent acts, and was let out of prison early despite an escape attempt. He should have never been out of prison when Deputy Johnson was murdered. He actually had no less than 46 prior charges on his criminal record.
This is not the first time the state has paid out such payments to crime victims. After three Marshall County residents were murdered in 2018, the state paid out the maximum amount from the fund because of a wrongful parole of the man that murdered the victims.
These crimes were all preventable, and the families have suffered because of bad decisions made by those in the Alabama Criminal Justice System.
Both nationally and even in Alabama progressive advocacy groups and media, along with their lobbyists, try to push a narrative that has no basis in reality nor is desired by the state’s citizens. Public safety is neither a partisan nor racial issue, nor is it more important to those that live in the rural and suburban areas as opposed to the urban communities.
Thus, these calls for opening up the prison doors and lobbyist pressure on legislators to weaken the state code fall on deaf ears. Rather, it is just the opposite; people have high expectations that their state leaders will pay attention to the increasing number of crime victims and the high recidivism rates. The revolving doors of state jails and the prison system is a problem that has to be addressed.
And where is the accountability to the crime victim’s families and the citizens of the state for the decisions that allowed the release of these violent felons? There needs to be real accountability for those that allowed these violent felons to be released and resulted in the commission of heinous violent acts.
It will be a true failure to these crime victims if no one in state government is held responsible for these poor decisions.
Paul DeMarco is a former member of the Alabama House of Representatives and can be found on Twitter @Paul_DeMarco.