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 are numerous religions that started as revitalization movements claiming that the old-time religion had been corrupted by accumulated human error and self-interest. Islam’s a great example of that: it claims to be the same pure religion practiced by Abraham and Jesus. And there are some spin-offs of Islam that believe that, whenever things get too far off track, Allah sends another prophet to do a reboot (though mainstream Islam believes that Muhammad was the last prophet until Judgement Day).
Heresy plus power equals orthdoxy.
It’s rather interesting how LDS and Islam have a few things in common. Both made spin-offs (and a fair bit of retconning) and both claim that Jesus is not the last of the prophets…
I remember having a friend who was a recent convert to LDS talking his new thing with me (and me doing a lot of reading up on it at the time since up until then I had paid exactly zero attention to it. My mother was doing some info-dumps on me, too, since she feared I was at risk of falling into what she called a “cult”. She didn’t need to worry, I had zero interest in something like LDS and if I was going to join up with anything, anything that involved quitting coffee is never going to be on that list…) at nearly the exact same time I had a rather devout co-worker who was Muslim (prior to starting the job, he literally got off a plane from his home country of Saudi Arabia the day before) telling me about his beliefs. The succession of prophets thing especially stuck out, along with each having their own lineage coming from Abrahamic roots…