Minneapolis got a taste of justice in President Joe Biden’s America.
In May 2020, a Rochester, Minnesota, man named Montez Terriel Lee burned down a Minneapolis pawn shop in the days of sustained rioting that followed the death of George Floyd, according to local media reports.
That happened the same night rioters burned down a city police precinct.
“We know for sure that Lee set the blaze because he confessed,” news reports say.
Two months after the blaze at Max It Pawn, authorities discovered the body of a 30-year-old man, Oscar Stewart Jr.
The fire killed Stewart.
Lee was not directly charged with Stewart’s murder. But, as the Rochester Post-Bulletin reported, prosecutors noted in court documents that “the Court’s sentence must account for the fact that Mr. Lee’s crime took Oscar Stewart’s life.”
Under federal sentencing guidelines, Lee was on track to spend 20 years in prison.
When actually sentenced two weeks ago, Lee got 10 years – half the recommended time.
One reason was that federal prosecutors wanted leniency. They recommended just 12 years – for killing a man, for destroying a family business and the livelihoods of its owners and employees, and for contributing to the violence and lawlessness that defined a major U.S. city for days.
Lee reportedly apologized for killing Stewart. He also apologized for destroying the pawnshop.
But he was unrepentant about his motives for doing so.
As the Post-Bulletin reported, Lee told the court, “Though I don’t stand by my actions, I stand by my reasons behind them.” Those reasons included “the deaths of Black people because [of] racial profiling and the demonization of Black skin,” the Post-Bulletin.
According to the paper, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Calhoun-Lopez accepted that rationale.
Calhoun-Lopez said the evidence clearly indicated Lee did not intend to harm anyone, and that his reasons “for setting that fire matter.”
The prosecutor quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., telling the judge “We’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
Calhoun-Lopez said he believed that Lee was engaging in King’s words, the paper reported.
Yet the judge did prosecutors one better.
U.S. District Judge Wilhelmina Wright knocked another two years off the suggested sentence.
In court, she told Lee, “You are more than the person that destroyed that business by fire. You are more than the person who set that fire that killed a man.”
“And no matter how upset you may have been and you may currently be, you are alive today. You have a future. The victim of that fire does not. So while there are no excuses for your actions on May 28, 2020, you have a chance to move forward and live a productive life,” Wright added.
“You have a chance to move forward and contribute to a better life for yourself, to a better life for those that you love, and to a better life for others. I hope that you use your prison term to address the struggles that you have, Mr. Lee, and to commit to treating and working through your depression, your anxiety, your PTSD, and I hope that you also realize how your actions impact others.”
Welcome to our woke justice system, where felony murder, arson, committing general mayhem, and domestic terrorism are nearly excused – with Dr. King being cited as an excuse for it.
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