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.
Yep, and the exact reason the Founders were such sticklers on a seperation between church and state… on a secular society…
…was that the US was more or less initially settled by a bunch of Christian religious extremists of varying flavors, who all couldn’t hack it in Europe, and they knew that if you let the government start explicitly picking favorites with religions?
Well, then US history would look a lot more like (what was to them, fairly recent) European history.
Aka, a whole bunch of mostly Christians killing mostly other different Christians, with an occasional, quite notable pogrom against Jews, or crusade against Muslims.
… As we can currently see… they evidently did not establish this paradigm strongly enough to withstand just a few centuries of persistent and dogged US Christian Extremeism.
I guess at this point I’m just waiting for Utah to claim its own Greater Deseret boundaries and assert its own independence, maybe when the US is embroiled in just another actual, full fledged land war with Mexico.
Give it about a decade, I’d guess.