Guest Post by Alex Berenson
A 48-year-old man with a three-decade-history of violent felonies carjacked and killed a dogwalker in Seattle in 2024. Prosecutors can’t even get him to trial. Blue-state justice at its finest.
This weekend, X lit up over a plea deal in a murder case in Seattle.
In 2023, Cordell Goosby killed Elina Kwon and her unborn child in a random shooting in Seattle. On Friday, Goosby, who has a history of mental illness and drug abuse, pled not guilty by reason of insanity. Prosecutors accepted the plea. Goosby, who faced 57 years in prison, will be sent to a psychiatric hospital and could theoretically be released at any time.
Understandably, the case has provoked outrage on X. A post by Andy Ngo, an independent journalist, about it has now been viewed 60 million times (after Elon Musk reposted it, adding “This is insane.”)
Unfortunately, the Goosby case is not an outlier — as a second recent Seattle murder shows. Criminal justice in blue states appears to be working just about as well as everything else.
This morning, I posted the story that follows on X (over a link to Ngo’s post):
The Seattle criminal justice system is even worse than you imagine. So much worse.
The Goosby case is bad, but ANOTHER murder case stuck in the mental-health defense loop in Seattle makes it look like a model of justice.
On August 20, 2024, Jahmed Haynes, a 48-year-old career criminal, carjacked Ruth Dalton, an 80-year-old woman – as Dalton was about to drive to a nearby dog park (she worked as a dog walker).
Haynes threw her out of the car. People at the scene confronted him and tried to stop him, but he backed into her, crushing her to death with her own vehicle. After fleeing he drove to a park where he stabbed her dog Prince to death – as people at the park watched – and ditched Prince’s body in a recycling bin.
The cops arrested Haynes the next day. He had a bloody knife and her car keys on her, and his fingerprints were found in her abandoned car. Haynes has a long history of violent felonies – including ANOTHER case where he hit and killed a man while driving drunk.
Open and shut case, right?
Not in Seattle.
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(Jahmed Haynes and Ruth Dalton)
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Haynes has a history of mental illness which his defense attorneys say leaves him incompetent to stand trial. And he refuses to take medicine for it. So the state has to go to court to medicate him over objection at a forensic hospital so he can stand trial. But once he’s medicated, he’s moved back to jail, refuses the medicine again, and again becomes “too sick” to stand trial.
Keep in mind this has NOTHING to do with the question of whether he was legally sane at the time he killed Ruth Dalton – which should be easy for the state to prove, considering he clearly intentionally stole her car and fled.
A trial was initially set for January of 2025. But by refusing to participate in his defense, Haynes has kept the case from moving forward for almost two years – and paved the way for a chance at an insanity plea like Goosby’s. Haynes is facing life in prison and seems committed to dragging this out as long as possible, for his own amusement if for no other reason.
As Dalton’s granddaughter told a Seattle television station:
“This state is all about their rights, the criminal’s rights… He doesn’t want to medicate; you can’t make him… He doesn’t want to appear; you can’t make him… He doesn’t want to do this; you can make him, it’s his choice…
“The scales are not even in our justice system. They are heavily in favor of coddling people like Haynes, and they completely are forgetting about people like my grandmother.”1
Meanwhile, the main concern of the judge overseeing the case seems to be Haynes’s privacy – the judge asked the media not to show Haynes’s face at hearings (and they complied).
I wish I were making that up.
Here’s Jahmed Haynes’s face.
In fact, as awful as the Goosby case is, I believe the Haynes case is far worse.
Letting Goosby take an insanity plea is at least theoretically justifiable. Prosecutors agreed to allow him to take the plea after their own expert agreed with the defense’s expert and said he was mentally ill at the time of the shooting. When both experts agree a defendant is insane, the prosecution has almost no chance to convince a jury otherwise.
There’s also bodycam video of Goosby talking to a cop just BEFORE he shot Kwon. He’s psychotically complaining invisible people are out to get him. And Goosby didn’t try to escape after he shot Kwon. He just walked off, gave up when the police found him, and started talking about a white car that didn’t exist.
Goosby was dangerous and should have been involuntarily hospitalized. The fact that he was on the streets proves yet again that we have to make it easier to commit drug-abusing mentally ill people to civil confinement against their will. But unlike Haynes, Goosby did not have a long history of violence, and it is likely he was having a psychotic episode when he shot Kwon.
If you still want to send Goosby to prison, I get it.
But Haynes seems, at least to me, to be much more actively manipulative than Goosby. Based on their records, Goosby is a mentally ill person who committed an evil crime; Haynes is an evil person who is also mentally ill.
