The 1994 crime bill is back in the news; Donald Trump used it against Joe Biden in their recent election debate. Vlogger H.A. Goodman, a passionate Trump supporter, has also attacked the bill, citing Hillary Clinton who in 1996 as First Lady alluded to super-predators. According to Goodman, she was calling black youth super-predators, and this can only be construed as racism.
Here is her full quote in context. Although this quote rings true, it is ironic that Mrs Clinton went on to become one of the biggest super-predators of all time, both destroying Libya almost single-handed and plundering Haiti for her foundation.
Race hustlers continue to claim the crime bill and the mass incarceration that followed were purely race-based, if not part of that great white supremacist plot that is turning America less white by the year with plunging birth rates and massive illegal immigration. But whatever its faults, the crime bill with its ramping up of the war on drugs was a serious attempt to tackle a problem that was destroying the lives of many Americans, especially urban blacks.
Cocaine was legal in the United States until the turn of the Twentieth Century. With its prohibition, the price rose, and as with alcohol after the Volstead Act, criminal elements took over its distribution. While cocaine can be highly addictive, the 1980s saw the widespread use of a far more deadly derivative. Crack cocaine, crack-cocaine or simply crack is highly addictive and then some. Nothing better illustrates its potency than Kimberly McCarthy, who in 2013 became the 500th person to be executed in Texas by lethal injection.
As serial killers go, McCarthy was as unlikely a candidate as you could ask for. Born in Greenville, Texas (designated a city but in reality a small town), she became an occupational therapist. At some point she picked up her drug habit, and in 1988 murdered two elderly women in their own homes to fund it. These murders were committed in quick succession, and both were extremely brutal, suggesting a male assailant.
In 1990, she was convicted of forgery. In 1993, she married a man named Aaron Michaels, bearing him a son, but they divorced in 1996. It remains to be seen if she was able to kick the habit for extended periods, although she was known to have funded it by prostituting herself as well, but in 1997 she was 36, and with her looks fading, she committed her third and final murder. Retired academic and widow Dorothy Booth was a close neighbour, making this a risky enterprise indeed. If anything, her murder was even more brutal than the first two, and after killing the widow, McCarthy hacked off the victim’s ring finger in order to sell her wedding band.
She was arrested in short order, and at her trial, a police officer testified she offered to confess to the murder if she were given just one more hit of crack. The following year, Kimberly McCarthy was tried only for the murder of Dorothy Booth, convicted and sentenced to death, but not untypically spent a decade and a half on death row before her execution at Huntsville on June 26, 2013.
While it is easy to explain away drug-related murders by gangstas as the result of bad life choices or simply bad blood, when people who don’t fall into that category follow the same route, society should have great cause for concern. Joe Biden’s wayward son Hunter (pictured) and countless A List entertainers have had similar habits, which begs the question how many of them would have ended up on death row or serving life for murder but for having deep pockets?
The 1994 crime bill was a serious attempt to tackle a serious problem, and it failed seriously. A new approach is needed to avoid both personal tragedies and mass incarceration. Whatever the answer, clearly the Joe Bidens of this world don’t have it.
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