Left-Wing Lawyer Spared 5-Year Sentence, Will Only Serve 15 Months For Firebombing Police Car
During the riots in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer, left-wing lawyer Urooj Rahman firebombed a police car in New York City. She will only spend 15 months in prison for the crime, which was below the 5 years prosecutors sought.
From the Washington Free Beacon:
Urooj Rahman, a public interest lawyer who firebombed a police cruiser during the 2020 George Floyd riots, was sentenced to just 15 months in prison on Friday after the Biden Justice Department intervened on her behalf, pressing the court to issue a sentence below the guidelines that called for 10 years.
U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan of the Eastern District of New York handed down the sentence to a packed courtroom in Brooklyn, where Rahman’s allies gathered in solidarity. Rahman, who faced up to five years in prison, told supporters the sentence “wasn’t the result we wanted.” Her attorney, Peter Baldwin, said Rahman’s defense team was “obviously disappointed with the result, but we are excited that Urooj can move on to the next phase of her life.”
Rahman and her accomplice, Colinford Mattis, leveraged their connections to top universities, white-shoe law firms, and the Obama administration, to win sympathy from liberal elites. They were the subjects of glowing profiles in national media during their prosecution, and struck a sweetheart deal with the Biden Justice Department, which, in a rare move, intervened to ask the court to go easy on them after the Trump administration had pressed for an aggressive prosecution.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
The plea deal paid off for Rahman, who was also sentenced to two years of supervised release. Cogan chastised Rahman for the “amazing level of arrogance” it took for a lawyer to perpetrate an “attack on the rule of law.” But the judge also called Rahman “a remarkable person who did a terrible thing one night,” echoing the case her lawyers made in her defense.
Can you imagine the Justice Department showing a “Christian nationalist” who attacked a police officer with this kind of leniency? Of course not. Just another example of one set of rules for the left, and another set of rules for everyone else.
What kind of a message does this send? It tells leftists that they can attack law enforcement and otherwise engage in violence during a riot and they will not be severely punished for it. If you don’t punish acts of violence severely, especially those committed against law enforcement, you will only encourage more attacks. We have to assume that the Biden Justice Department is pro-riot and anti-law enforcement.
It’s not all sunshine for Rahman. The guilty plea triggers an automatic disbarment in New York State and she has been disbarred. I suppose that’s some semblance of justice.
Once again, the Biden Justice Department shows that it is selectively soft on crime. All you have to do is be ideologically aligned with them and they will cut you a break. Meanwhile, the rest of us pay the price.
