The voters of Washington, D.C., could have chosen anyone to serve on their Advisory Neighborhood Commission—but the man they picked is a convicted murderer who’s currently in the slammer.
Joel Caston had been in prison for murder for 27 years. He’s been in office just a few weeks.
Caston is a former drug dealer who killed another teenager when he was 18 years old.
It’s nothing new for crooks to serve in office, but this one committed his crime before his election.
In prison, he’s studied multiple languages including Arabic and says he’s completely reformed—and ready to represent the values of his fellow inmates.
“I represent every incarcerated person on the planet,” Caston told the French news service AFP. “If we are given a chance, we can participate in the political process. We could be an asset, not a liability to our community.”
He wants to represent the convicts…and they’re already whispering their ideas in his ear.
“In the jail, people are constantly asking me questions and telling me about their concerns,” Caston told The Washington Informer.
Opportunity knocked last July, when the nation’s capital decided to let people vote from prison. District officials quickly registered 400 of the 2,600 eligible convicts whose vote would count as much as that of any law-abiding citizen. ABC News gushed that the decision “pushed the boundaries of voting rights and racial justice,” since a large percentage of inmates are Black. But then most victims of Black criminals are also Black. So that doesn’t seem like a win … except for the Democrats.
As it turns out, the one-party city had actually gerrymandered a district where most of the voters could be inmates back in the 1990s, but no one had ever been elected there.
Local media report that Washington, D.C.’s District 7F07 only has three major residences: the 1,400-inmate jail, the Harriet Tubman Women’s Shelter (where almost no one lives long-term), and the new Park Kennedy apartment complex.
Currently, two states—Maine and Vermont—allow prisoners to vote from prison … but Democrats think that’s not nearly enough. During his 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont endorsed the idea of sending ballots to criminals—even terrorists—currently doing time in the penitentiary.
And they’ve hardly gotten started. “Less than 1% of the nation’s estimated 1.8 million incarcerated residents have the right to cast ballots from behind bars, according to The Sentencing Project,” ABC reports.
The one bill Democrats are fixated on passing—HR 1—would give current convicts and ex-con the right to have a say in how we make our laws.
The Sentencing Project told left-wingers that their “support for H.R. 1 and its provisions to end voting exclusions for people with convictions, including Representative Cori Bush’s amendment to expand voting to people in prison, is an essential step to ensuring racial equity and strengthening democracy.”
That’s why some Republicans are so completely opposed to the bill. “It’s called punishment—punishment for their crime. And it’s unconscionable to me that we’re even debating this,” said Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C.
Democrats don’t think it’s unconscionable; they think it’s their path to power…and they say Caston is an inspiration.
“Once I got my… official email address, I logged on to 600 plus emails in my inbox,” he said. “I was in a deficit from the beginning.” Just like our government.
His cousin, Delante Uzzle, told ABC News, “I won’t be surprised if he becomes mayor. That wouldn’t shock me one bit.”
It wouldn’t surprise us, either. If Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Kamala Harris have their way, an ex-convict could be elected president one day.
What does it say that one of the nation’s two largest political parties wants to defund the police and give unrepentant murderers or terrorists the right to vote? Whose interests do you think they have in mind — the victim or the perpetrator?
The answer is: Their own.
This whole sordid election shows just how criminal the Democratic Party has become.
Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”