Most of tend to think of soft-on-crime judges and prosecutors as a blue state phenomenon, but the truth is that these ideologues can be found in even the most crimson of red states. The damage done by allowing violent felons to quickly return to the streets after a slap on the wrist is incalculable, but it certainly appears like this philosophy is at least partly to blame for the death of a Louisiana man.
The shooting death happened on Monday night, and in addition to the fatality two other individuals were wounded. Authorities have arrested a 22-year-old man named Jasiah Deontae Lewis for the shootings, and as it turns out, Lewis is no stranger to the law.
In 2023, Lewis was charged with second-degree murder following a deadly shooting at a local hotel. A grand jury later indicted him on that charge. His bond was initially set at $1 million, before later being reduced to $100,000 during court proceedings.
The case remained active for more than a year and included several competency hearings ordered by the court.
In December 2025, Lewis entered a no contest plea to a reduced charge of manslaughter.
That was just a few months ago. So why was Lewis out and about and allegedly responsible for committing this crime?
Because in January of this year a Louisiana judge sentenced Lewis to five years hard labor on the manslaughter charge, and then turned around and suspended the sentence entirely.
The 2023 case doesn’t appear to have been covered by local media at all, so it’s hard to know what played into the prosecutor’s decision to offer Lewis a deal that allowed him to plead no contest to manslaughter instead of taking the second-degree murder charge to trial. The fact that there were multiple competency hearings, though, suggests that Lewis may have planned on arguing that mental illness was responsible for his violent actions.
Let’s assume for a second that was actually the case. Shouldn’t the judge have recognized that a killer with mental troubles needs more supervision than checking in with a probation officer once in a while? If Lewis had been deemed competent to stand trial, which was apparently the case, then confinement to a mental institution may not have been possible, even if that was the best place for him. It’s undeniable, though, that prison would have been a much more appropriate destination than sending Lewis back home on probation.
There may have been extenuating circumstances that led prosecutors to offer Lewis a deal, but even if the prosecution’s case wasn’t particularly strong, Lewis still admitted there was enough evidence to convict him of manslaughter. Is that really such an unserious crime in Louisiana that mere probation is ever appropriate? I’d like to think that’s not the case, yet something led the judge to spare Lewis the possibility of doing any hard time for taking a life.
Louisiana is a permitless carry state, and I hope that everyone eligible to carry a firearm will do so after getting the training they need to be competent in defending themselves against the violent predators who are being released back into polite society instead of being confined to a prison. We need to vote out these soft-on-crime judges and prosecutors whenever possible, but we also need to do what we can to ensure that we’re not the next victim of their bad decisions.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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