Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host Donald Trump tapped as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, is fixated on locking up and prosecuting children as if they were adults.

Pirro is arguably the most prominent face of Trump’s authoritarian quest to “take over” the district, an effort that has involved the deployment of the military and federal law enforcement, which local residents and lawmakers have decried for terrorizing and harassing adults and children alike in the largely Black district. 

For months now, she’s publicly complained about laws forbidding federal prosecutors from treating children as harshly as adults in some cases. “Young people are coddled and they don’t need to be coddled anymore,” she stated last year.

Talk of “coddling” criminals is certainly rich coming from a leader at a Justice Department that has dismissed tens of thousands of cases, in an administration led by someone convicted of a felony who on his first day back in office pardoned throngs of insurrectionists, some of whom have gone on to commit other crimes, including crimes of violence and child sex predation.

Nonetheless, Pirro has argued for the D.C. council to change local laws to allow her to try children as young as 12 charged with a violent crime in court as an adult. 

In response, the Sentencing Project, a civil rights group focused on incarceration, noted that D.C. laws already afford prosecutors broad latitude to try children as adults. The group noted that, given policing disparities in the district, lowering the age at Pirro’s urging would likely endanger Black children:

DC law currently gives prosecutors more unchecked power than prosecutors in 48 states to send youth to adult court. A vast body of research has established that youth charged as if they are adults are more likely to reoffend than youth processed in the juvenile courts. Changing DC law to send more youth to adult court will result in sending more Black youth, and even younger Black children, to adult court.

Pirro is advocating for a theory of law that portrays children as if they’re not actually children — a tactic that’s been deployed by racist law enforcement officials throughout American history. The execution of 14-year-old George Stinney in 1944, via electric chair, is a prime example. 

Pirro did hit a speed bump during a Newsmax interview on Wednesday in which she acknowledged — correctly but, in her framing, mistakenly — that her effort would target “kids.” The U.S. attorney rattled off a list of crimes for which people under 18 can be tried as adults but complained, like a cartoon villain, about laws that prevent her from doing so for 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds for other crimes. 

“I can’t get my hands on these kids,” Pirro said, before checking herself. “They’re not kids — I misspoke.”

Watch Pirro’s revealing rant above.

The post Pirro complains she can’t get her ‘hands on these kids’ in push to try teens as adults appeared first on MS NOW.

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