Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff
A simple, straightforward question in the wake of Patrick Burris's forced resignation from his chosen profession:
What is a "career criminal" doing on the outside?
The 41-year-old man had a criminal record that spanned two dozen typed pages. And yet, he was free to stalk and kill five innocent people in Gaffney, S.C., until being shot to death himself by police investigating a burglary in nearby Gastonia, N.C.
"At some point," says State Law Enforcement Division Chief Reggie Lloyd, "the criminal justice system is going to need to explain why this suspect was out on the street."
How about now?
Apparently, Burris was paroled from a North Carolina prison just a couple months before his killing spree terrorized a South Carolina town and stunned the Palmetto State.
How could the system have not seen that this guy was a career criminal?
And remember, his rap sheet is only those crimes which law enforcement knows about. There may indeed be other killings in this monster's past.
A peach farmer; an 83-year-old woman and her daughter; and a father and daughter at the family furniture store. All were killed by a man the government knew for years was dangerous.
The courts and corrections system are complicit in those murders.
A number of years ago, the country went on a binge of cracking down on repeat offenders, with such things as "three strikes and you're out" laws: after the third felony, you're in prison for life.
That was over-simplistic, and ended up in a few horror stories of people facing life in prison for relatively low-grade felonies.
But perhaps the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. When a repeat robber, burglar and thief like Patrick Burris is allowed to prowl the streets with a 25-page rap sheet stuck to the bottom of his shoe like toilet paper, then you know society is getting it wrong.
Our various legislatures spend up to half the year yakking it up, and can't seem to figure this sort of thing out.
If lawmakers in South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina and other states do nothing else in their next legislative session, they had better find a way to protect the public better than they are now.
It's not rocket science. Lawmakers need to agree on a definition of a career criminal, using whatever factors they choose. Once the threshold they have chosen has been met -- number of years involved, number of crimes, number of convictions, number of addresses in their address book, whatever -- then the person needs to be put in prison for life, no parole.
The system, and the lawmakers who preside over it, simply must accept that parole does not work in many cases.
Among the crimes Burris was serving time for in North Carolina before his parole: being a habitual felon.
Surprised? We thought not.
So why are officials surprised that when they release "habitual" offenders, they get more offenses?