Islamist Immigrant Murderer Allowed To Flee Country, Was Given ’48-Hour’ Leave From Mental Hospital

An illegal alien commits murder, gets found not guilty by reason of insanity, and somehow ends up with a foreign passport in hand and permission for unsupervised outings from the mental hospital that's supposed to be holding him. Then he's gone. Back home, free, while whoever he killed stays dead. You could not write a more perfect illustration of a system that has stopped asking basic questions, like whether someone here illegally who just committed a homicide should be trusted with day passes.

Somebody in Virginia had to sign off on that passport paperwork. Somebody approved the unsupervised leave. These aren't accidents that happen in the dark. Each step required a person with a title and a desk to decide this was fine. And each one of them apparently decided that an insanity finding erases the fact that this man was never supposed to be in the country to begin with, let alone free to hop a flight out of it whenever the mood struck.

The insanity plea might be legally sound, we're not psychiatrists and we're not relitigating the verdict. But "not guilty by reason of insanity" has never meant "no longer anyone's responsibility to track." That's the part nobody wants to own. If the state believes he's dangerous enough to commit, it should believe he's dangerous enough to actually supervise, not dangerous enough to commit but relaxed enough to grant him a passport and a weekend pass.

Families of victims in cases like this are told to trust the process. Here the process produced a killer on a plane home, unaccountable, unreachable, and functionally untouchable now that he's outside U.S. jurisdiction. If that doesn't prompt a serious look at how Virginia handles immigration status inside its own courts and hospitals, nothing will.