Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon reports:
Liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz sentenced a serial violent felon to just six months in prison for breaking his estranged wife’s face in a brutal beating. Less than one year later, the man gunned down the same victim outside her home, nearly killing her, according to court records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. […]
[Convicted felon Lazarick] Spade was initially charged with felony battery and faced up to 10 years in prison as a habitual offender, but the charges were reduced in a plea deal approved by Protasiewicz. She sentenced him to six months in prison.
Less than two years later, in June 2017, Spade ambushed and shot his ex-wife multiple times outside her home in Milwaukee, according to court records.
Protasiewicz made multiple false claims about her record on criminal sentencing at last week’s debate:
The heated debate between progressive Janet Protasiewicz and conservative Dan Kelly covered much familiar terrain in an election in which “everything” is on the line. But the debate grew most contentious as Kelly focused on Protasiewicz’s record on criminal sentencing as a Milwaukee judge.
“A man [who] raped a 15-year-old came to you for sentencing. You said no prison time at all because Covid. There is no way that Covid provides a Get Out of Jail Free card for a man who raped a woman,” Kelly said.
“I can tell you that sentences take hours — sometimes half a day, sometimes a day. There was no way I would have said in any case, you’re not going to prison — Covid. That’s an outright lie,” Protasiewicz replied.
But according to a transcript of a case involving the statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl by a 25-year-old man, Protasiewicz had in fact said: “But for Covid, I would be giving you some House of Correction time. These are strange times. . . . I’m not going to do that.”
Kelly later focused on a case in which Protasiewicz gave a lenient sentence to a man who raped his cousin while she was unconscious:
So when the young man raped his cousin and came to you for sentencing, you gave him a paltry one year and two months in prison. And then you looked at him — and this is in the sentencing transcript — after the victim had testified how she couldn’t work anymore, how she sobbed every day, how her boyfriend had abandoned her as, quote, “damaged goods.” You looked at him and said you saw a good man in him. And then you said, you didn’t think he was a danger to society. The woman was his cousin.
Protasiewicz replied: “I certainly would like to see that transcript in total. That certainly doesn’t sound like anything that I would do.”
Protasiewicz had indeed said to a man who raped his unconscious cousin: “Are you a danger to the public? I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t think that you did anything other than engage in a crime of opportunity; and hopefully you’ve learned your lesson. In regard to your character . . . there’s a lot of good things about you.”