(UnitedVoice.com) – On July 4, 2020, 11-year-old Davon McNeal exited a vehicle in Washington, DC, and ran towards a basement apartment. He never made it. A man fired a gun and killed the little boy. Now, that death has come back to haunt one of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees and caused the POTUS to abandon him.
When the new year began, President Joe Biden resubmitted the names of judges whose nominations had expired. Judge Todd Edelman, who was nominated for the US District Court for the District of Columbia, was not resubmitted. He’d been nominated in 2022 but had languished in the Senate after Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) waged a campaign against him.
The senator took issue with a decision Edelman made in 2020, during the national health crisis. In May of that year, felon Christian Wingfield, who was in a DC jail awaiting trial on two weapons charges, filed a motion to be released from jail because of the pandemic. He had asthma and was at an increased risk. Another judge initially denied his request because of an objection from the government. But that was a mistake because the government had not filed an opposition.
Wingfield’s attorneys filed the request again, and that time, it went before Edelman, a Superior Court judge, who granted the request. At the time, officials were trying to reduce the jail population and allow non-violent offenders to await their trials at home. Edelman ordered electronic monitoring for Wingfield, and he went home.
Three months later, he was at a barbeque with three other men when one of them fired a weapon. A stray bullet from that gun hit McNeal and killed him. Police arrested all four men in the weeks that followed. Prosecutors acknowledged that Wingfield was not the shooter and, though he was armed, didn’t fire a weapon. Still, he was charged because he was with the other men. He decided to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter and received more than nine years in prison.
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