With the recent murders of a DA and Assistant DA in Texas as well as the head of the Colorado prison system, it seems as if the rules are changing.  Don’t like a prosecution?  Kill the prosecutor.  Don’t like what happened to you in prison?  Kill the head of the prison system.  This desire to kill public safety officials is not a new one, but we need to think more about why this sudden uptick.

There is much to write and speculate about in both of these instances.  Were, particularly the Texas slayings, the work of white supremacists?  And what about the fact that the DA McLelland was armed but unable to prevent his and his wife’s deaths?

The New York Times story begins

After the daylight assassination of his deputy two months ago, Mike McLelland, the district attorney in largely rural Kaufman County, responded with a flash of angry bravado, denigrating the perpetrators as “scum” and vowing to hunt them down.

A former Army officer who served in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, Mr. McLelland carried a gun and refused to be intimidated, according to a friend and the local news media, even as his wife expressed unease, worrying that her husband, too, could be in danger.

The home of Mike McLelland, the district attorney for Kaufman County.

Is it possible that his bravado and the common knowledge that he was armed goaded the murderer?

Ceremony at the State Capitol building in Denver.

The killing of prison chief, Tom Clements, does not appear to be caused by any white supremest leanings.  The cause may be prolonged solitary confinement  as Susan Greene wrote for the Colorado Independent.

In the weeks before his death, Evan Ebel, suspected killer of Colorado Department of Corrections Director Tom Clements, had broken ties with white supremacist prison gang 211 Crew and was debilitated by the transition from prolonged isolation to social contact, according to a friend and former fellow inmate.

In a series of interviews conducted with The Colorado Independent, parolee Ryan Pettigrew dismissed widespread media speculation that Ebel shot Clements as part of an orchestrated 211 Crew “gang hit.” He said that, over the course of the last few weeks, Ebel was growing increasingly agitated in his adjustment to life outside of prison and beyond the tiny “administrative segregation” cells in which he spent years deprived of regular human contact.

Ironically, Clements worried about the transition from solitary confinement.

In an exclusive interview last spring, Clements said that, immediately after Hickenlooper recruited him from Missouri to run the Colorado corrections department, he found disturbing “one very alarming statistic” he said kept him up at night — that 47 percent of Colorado prisoners being released from isolation were walking directly out onto the streets without help reintegrating into social environments and interacting with people.

Clements wanted longer transition periods and step-down programs before setting isolated prisoners free. As Pettigrew tells it, Ebel said he had little help making that transition. He said altercations during his brief period in a step-down program landed him back in isolation.

“You have to ask yourself the question – How does holding inmates in administrative segregation and then putting them out on a bus into the public, [how does that] square up?” Clements said.

“We have to think about how what we do in prisons impacts the community when [prisoners] leave,” Clements continued. “It’s not just about running the prison safely and securely. There’s a lot of research around solitary and isolation in recent years, some tied to POWs and some to corrections. My experience tells me that long periods of isolation can be counter-productive to stable behavior and long-term rehabilitation goals.”

All three acts of violence did involve guns.  The gun used to kill Clements was purchased legally, but transferred to Ebel illegally as a “straw” purchase.  Would the requirement for a background check on the private transfer have prevented Clements’ death?  Probably not.  Is that a reason not to require universal checks?  No.  There likely would have been no deterrent in this case, but it might just stop someone else.

Race may figure into Prosecutors McLelland and Hasse’s murders, but at least part of the motivation is the prosecution of a gang.  The New York Times story continues

One of several angles investigators have been exploring is whether Mr. Hasse’s killing involved members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas prison gang. Prosecutors in Mr. McLelland’s office had assisted in investigations of the gang, including a recent case that had dealt a major blow to the group’s leadership.

In that case, federal authorities announced in November that a grand jury in Houston had indicted more than 30 senior leaders and other members of the whites-only gang on charges of conspiring to participate in a racketeering enterprise. Federal officials said the defendants were also charged with involvement in three murders, multiple attempted murders, kidnappings and assaults and conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine and cocaine.

The indictments stemmed from an investigation led by a multiagency task force that included Kaufman County prosecutors and three other district attorneys offices. In December, the Texas Department of Public Safety issued a statewide bulletin warning officials that the Aryan Brotherhood was planning retaliation against law enforcement personnel who had helped secure the indictments.

Mr. Hasse was shot the same day that two members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas — Ben Christian Dillon, also known as “Tuff,” of Houston, and James Marshall Meldrum, also known as “Dirty,” of Dallas — pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in Federal District Court in Houston

Boston had a similar murder in 1995 when Paul McLaughlin an ADA known for his prosecution of gang members was murdered as he left a commuter rail station.  The man he was about to prosecute for the third time was convicted for the murder and is serving life.

It is a dangerous life working in the criminal justice system.  The sheer number of guns out there doesn’t help.  Neither does the criminal justice system itself.

Photograph of McLelland home Mike Fuentes/Associated Press

Photograph of Clements ceremony Matthew Staver for The New York Times

Related articles

• Killing of Texas prosecutor, wife, raises fear of wider plot against law … – The Seattle Times (seattletimes.com)
• Texas District Attorney And His Wife Shot To Death In Home (theobamacrat.com)
• Texas DA and Wife Killed, Possible Aryan Brotherhood Link (crooksandliars.com)
• Texas DA and wife killed in ‘targeted act’ two months after assistant’s death (guardian.co.uk)