The Other McCain

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Something Has Gone Disastrously Wrong With the Criminal Justice System in Ohio

Posted on | March 15, 2021 | Comments Off on Something Has Gone Disastrously Wrong With the Criminal Justice System in Ohio

Say hello to Cortez Turray Larkin, Ohio’s one-man crime wave.

If I were a citizen of Ohio, I would be bombarding my state legislators with emails and telephone calls demanding to know why the state has been unable to keep this lifelong criminal locked up. On Memorial Day 2016, police in Columbus arrested Larkin for shooting a man in the head. Police noted: “One of the gunshots missed the victim & struck the home of a neighbor. Luckily no one was injured inside.” The report also noted that this was the 14th time Larkin had been arrested by Columbus Police. That doesn’t include his arrests in other jurisdictions.

At the time of his Memorial Day 2016 shooting arrest, Larkin was 33 and had only recently been released from an Ohio prison after serving time for charges in Marion County, where he had been arrested in November 2014 and charged with receiving stolen property, falsification and conveyance or possession of a deadly weapon.

Did I mention he shot somebody in the head? The victim somehow survived, but still you might think shooting somebody in the head would be a serious enough crime to put Cortez Larkin away for a long time. But this is Ohio, where apparently it’s impossible to lock anyone up for anything, so by 2018, Larkin was back on the streets. How do I know this? Because he was committing felonies, which is what he does whenever he’s not behind bars. One imagines detectives in Ohio have an easy time solving cases; just ask, “Where was Cortez Larkin when this crime happened?” If he doesn’t have an alibi, he did it.

In January 2018, a Delaware County grand jury indicted Larkin for two felony counts of receiving stolen property, but if you thought these charges would be enough to put this criminal back in prison for a long sentence, you don’t know how useless Ohio’s criminal justice system is.

On January 5 of this year, a state trooper clocked a speeding car near Bowling Green, Ohio. After running the license plate, the trooper learned that the Ford Escape was stolen. The driver of the stolen Ford then led troopers on a 60-mile pursuit all the way down I-75 to Cridersville. Police used “stop sticks” to deflate the tires on the car, but the suspect kept going another 10 miles driving on the rims, and wasn’t stopped until troopers set up a “rolling roadblock” and rammed the Ford off the highway. Another 20 minutes was spent in a standoff before the suspect finally exited the vehicle, at which point troopers learned they had apprehended — you guessed, didn’t you? — Cortez Turray Larkin.

 

You won’t be surprised to learn that, after troopers arrested Larkin, they learned there were “multiple felony warrants out for his arrest.”

Why even bother arresting criminals, if judges just turn them loose?

Next time some liberal starts whining about “mass incarceration,” just cite the example of Cortez Larkin. If this guy can’t be kept in prison, how can anyone claim we have a “mass incarceration” problem?

And if you live in Ohio, please for the love of God contact your state legislators and ask them to do something to stop this madness. Unless Ohio starts locking up habitual offenders for long sentences, nobody’s life or property will be safe. If you can’t keep Cortez Larkin behind bars, what’s the point of even having prisons at all?




 

Category: Crime, Ohio

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