The effort to bring federal charges has been met with resistance by some career prosecutors who argue the crime doesn’t appear to fall under any federal statutes.
Three months after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Justice Department is weighing how to bring federal charges against the shooter, including under a novel legal theory that it was an anti-Christian hate crime, according to three people familiar with the investigation.
The suspect, Tyler Robinson, is already facing multiple state charges, including an aggravated murder count, and Utah prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty. Robinson’s partner is trans, and authorities have produced text messages from the suspect to his partner saying he was motivated to kill Kirk because he had “enough of his hatred.”
It’s not uncommon for defendants to face both state and federal charges, including for drug-related crimes and domestic terrorist attacks, among other offenses. But the effort to bring federal charges in the Kirk case has been met with resistance by some career prosecutors who have argued that the crime doesn’t appear to fall under any federal statutes, the three people said.
There had also been two centuries of religious wars and civil strife in both Britain and mainland Europe that laid waste to whole societies for no good reason.
But not all the early British settlers of the US were religious whackjobs. For example, Georgia included a large penal colony. And even among the religious whackjobs, some, like the Quakers in Pennsylvania, were far less deranged than, for example, the insane mob that landed at Plymouth Rock.
Those are all good specific, relevant, additional details to bring up, yes, I did gloss over aspects of history a bit, hehe.
“more or less”
(load bearing phrasing, lol)