Florida Shows How States Can Restrain Rogue Judges Who Let Violent Criminals Go Free
By: Auguste Meyrat
July 06, 2026
In August 2021, Florida woman Precious Bland drowned her 15-month-old and stabbed her husband who tried to stop her along with her teen daughter. After she was arrested and put on trial nearly five years later, she pled insanity, claiming that she had a “psychotic break” due to the stresses of Covid. At the time of the drowning she allegedly screamed, “Jesus Christ is coming, and Covid is going to kill us all!” The judge of this case, Miguel de la O, apparently found this argument persuasive and acquitted Bland.
Typically, the story would end there. Time and again, a psychotic murderer commits a heinous crime, stands before a liberal judge and claims insanity, receives mental health treatment, and is then released back into the public so that they can have more “psychotic breaks” that harm innocent people.
A recent example of this was DeCarlos Brown Jr., the murderer of the young Ukrainian woman Iryna Zarutska. Instead of putting Brown on death row for repeatedly stabbing an innocent woman on a bus, the judge instead found Brown “incompetent to stand trial.” Leftists have pointed out that Brown has not been released, but kept in federal custody in a mental health facility until he becomes adequately competent to stand trial and receive punishment. Nevertheless, as Chris Sharp writes in City Journal, if Brown cannot recover from his mental illness, he will likely be returned to state custody which “could allow Brown’s case to be dismissed, setting him free.”
Fortunately, someone is pushing back against this gross injustice. Responding to the acquittal of Precious Bland, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is filing articles of impeachment against the judge. In a recent press conference, Uthmeier called out other such rulings from judges who refuse to punish dangerous criminals like Bland, including a man released after attempted murder who later killed three tourists as well as a child sex offender who later murdered his five-year-old stepdaughter. All of these monsters pled insanity and were quietly released by liberal judges refusing to administer the law as written.
https://thefederalist.com/2026/07/06/florida-shows-how-states-can-restrain-rogue-judges-who-let-violent-criminals-go-free/
