A Texas district attorney backed by billionaire George Soros is under fire after a plea deal that gave a drunk driver who was in the U.S. illegally a mere 10-day jail sentence for pleading guilty to a crash that killed his 19-year-old passenger.
Leo Anthony Carreto-Lopez, 19, was arrested after smashing his car into a tree on May 30, killing Teresa Gonzale. A few days later, Carreto-Lopez was charged with intoxication manslaughter, according to KXAN-TV in Austin.
When the young man got to court, he arranged a plea deal with Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza and pleaded guilty. Instead of a prison sentence commensurate with taking a life, followed by a deportation order after the prison term, Garza’s deal gave this admitted killer a misdemeanor conviction and a mere 10 days in jail, Fox News reported last week.
Rightfully, Carreto-Lopez should have faced a charge of intoxication manslaughter, which is a second-degree felony. A second-degree felony conviction, under Texas law, carries a prison term of between two and 20 years.
He is serving 10 days in the Travis County Jail for his sentence, court documents stated.https://t.co/BffOtgZ6lm
— KXAN News (@KXAN_News) September 12, 2022
Unsurprisingly, the light sentence drew heavy criticism from law enforcement groups.
The Austin Police Association, for one, jumped to its Twitter account to blast Garza for “going easy on violent criminals.”
“Another example of Travis County prosecutors going easy on violent criminals. Victims lives are marginalized. Where is the justice for the families & loved ones of the victim?” the group tweeted, linking to a story on the sentence.
Another example of Travis County prosecutors going easy on violent criminals. Victims lives are marginalized. Where is the justice for the families & loved ones of the victim? https://t.co/o5EJabw9U6
— Austin Police Association (@ATXPOA) September 13, 2022
Garza is another one of the slew of anti-police, left-wingers who ran on a “criminal justice reform” platform and got elected all with millions supplied by anti-American billionaire George Soros and his work, left-wing political action committee organizations created specifically to elect “reform” DAs.
In June, voters in liberal San Francisco ousted then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin amid the city’s worsening crime, but too many Soros-backed prosecutors remain in office to wreak havoc on the American justice system.
The Hungarian-born activist, who recently issued a warning to American “enemies of democracy” who oppose him, contributed $652,000 to the Texas Justice & Public Safety PAC in the months leading up to the 2020 Travis County DA election, Fox reported. The PAC spent nearly $1 million on campaign advertising for Garza’s campaign.
Like most of the others bankrolled by Soros organizations, as soon as he entered office, Garza began instituting policies that resulted in convicted criminals receiving either extremely lenient prison sentences or no punishment. So, since the election, Soros has gotten his money’s worth.
For instance, Garza immediately implemented new sentencing guidelines that emphasize keeping criminals out of jail “to responsibly reduce over-incarceration.”
As another example of his coddling of criminals, Fox News noted that Garza released a man charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and multiple murders. The man had put up bond, but Garza’s office did not require any bail conditions, such as a curfew or GPS monitoring.
Dennis Farris, president of the Austin Police Retired Officer’s Association, blasted Garza’s light sentence to Carreto-Lopez as “unfathomable.”
“That’s the way Travis County is,” Farris told Fox. “That’s the way we are with people being arrested for murder and everything else being let out because this DA doesn’t believe that just because you’re arrested for a crime you should sit in jail.”
Austin personal injury attorney Adam Loewy also blasted Garza for endangering the citizens of Austin.
“When the district attorney ran for office he was bankrolled by Soros groups and he made very clear that he wanted to pursue the typical ‘reimagine justice’ policies and that’s exactly what he’s doing,” Loewy told Fox.
Lowey added that Garza’s office is doing “anything it can” to reduce the prison population.
“One way of doing that is to not send people to prison when they deserve to be [in] prison,” Loewy said. “So this is all part of the plan. This is all part of the ‘reimagined justice’ approach and we’re seeing the real-life effect of it.”
Farris agreed.
“This is what this D.A. does. He truly believes that people should get the minimum amount of time in jail for any crime they commit. As long as he thinks it’s keeping Austin and Travis County safe, which the statistics are showing, that’s not happening,” he told Fox News.
“He is low bail, or no bail at all for even some of the most violent, horrible crimes that you can imagine. Murder, rape. He’s pled out a first-degree murder case to 15 years in jail for first-degree murder. It’s just on and on,” Farris said.
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It isn’t just Austin that George Soros has made more dangerous. With his billions behind him, starting nearly a decade ago, Soros launched a campaign to support left-wing, soft-on-crime district attorney candidates in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Texas, and more, Politico noted in 2016. And since 2016, his bankrolling of extremist DAs has only picked up steam.
Soros’ touch is being felt all across the country, and the foreign billionaire has defended his decade-long campaign to remake the American justice system to his own liking. Indeed, he even claimed that Americans love the way he is tearing down our system and rebuilding it with woke policies.
But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is one who isn’t putting up with it anymore. DeSantis recently suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren — an elected official — because he refused to prosecute violates of legal state laws.
In August, Fox News host Tucker Carlson outlined to his audience the ways Soros is actively subverting the rule of law in the United States.
According to a U.K. Daily Mail report in June, Soros and the groups he is funding — including Justice & Public Safety PAC, and Color of Change — have spent $40 million to elect 75 left-wing prosecutors over the last decade.
And a January report from the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank in the nation’s capital, noted that Soros has given $29 million to his “personal network” of PACS formed to back left-wing DA candidates.
The National Desk, a news program on the generally conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group, report in June that Soros and his PACs have been so successful in electing left-wing candidates that the prosecutor’s offices in half of America’s most populous cities are now led by a Soros puppet. And 1 in 5 Americans are now subject to the policies Soros’ prosecutors have put into action. Each one has come to office claiming to eye “reforms” to the prosecutor’s office, only to end up making their jurisdictions less safe for citizens.
Meanwhile, violent crime in the U.S. is surging to highs not seen in decades. Fox News recently noted that crime has risen as much as 40 percent in some areas. All this just as George Soros and his soft-on-crime activist groups are making matters far worse by giving criminals nothing to fear with low or no bail, prosecutors who won’t prosecute, and sentences reduced out of hand by activists who think our system is “racist.”
