Florida Man may have met his match in “Vermont Man,” Michael Reynolds, who can now boast of nearly 2,000 run-ins with Burlington police officers.
In December, Reynolds was accused of trespassing on the same property twice before refusing to leave the University of Vermont Medical Center and finally being cited for trespassing after leaving and then returning to the hospital. Later that same month, he was arrested for acting aggressively in public and then again for trying to assault security guards at the hospital and for breaking into a home while the owner was in the shower. He appeared in court on the eve of the New Year but was released again.
Reynolds seems incapable of helping himself, and if he is not taken off the streets it is probably only a matter of time before he does something horrific. Unfortunately, he has powerful allies in his corner, like Chittenden County State Attorney Sarah George, a prosecutor with ties to George Soros.
Though the promotion of these types of prosecutors seems to be on the back foot now, many of them remain entrenched across the country. Wherever they are, their influence translates into unsafe communities and insane criminal justice policies. Reynolds’s case is illustrative.
Reynolds has more than three dozen convictions. Six of those are felonies. He is currently facing another 20 charges, all filed recently. He is a one-man crime machine. Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad said in a statement that “Reynolds has more police encounters than anyone else in our records management system—more than 1,850 entries.”
“He has harmed huge numbers of people; he routinely endangers himself and others; and Burlington’s officers deal with him more than any other person,” Murad said.
Reynolds seems to be on a quest to prove that some people cannot be rehabilitated and simply need to be periodically kept behind bars. According to Murad, he has “exhausted outlets of charity, treatment, or relief, and burned bridges with entities that seek to help the disadvantaged.” Here is a person who is practically begging to be locked up, or at least someone who knows the system does not have the guts to put him away for a good long time.
“We have an answer for this kind of violent, incorrigible, antisocial behavior: Vermont’s ‘habitual criminal’ statute,” Murad said in his statement, which appeared on local television stations.
Reynolds’s attorney, a public defender named Joshua O’Hara, didn’t like Murad’s use of the bully pulpit, so he ran to George and asked her to bar him from making any further public comments about his client. O’Hara told Seven Days that George supported his request. In fact, she even made her own public statement, counter-signaling Murad. She painted Reynolds as a kind of wayward lamb.
“A significant majority of his charges are not violent, so I’m not sure the public needs protection from him,” George told WCAX-TV. “The public needs him to be given significant services and resources that we don’t currently have, so his underlying trauma can be truly healed.”
If George had her way, the public would be kept in the dark about the fact that, as Murad said, Reynolds “has harmed huge numbers of people; he routinely endangers himself and others; and Burlington’s officers deal with him more than any other person.” The public wouldn’t know that Reynolds had already been given every opportunity to help himself and bit the hand that tried to help him to his feet. Why would she want that? Because George is a true believer, which is also why she is affiliated with the Soros network of progressive prosecutors.
In 2018, George was one of the prosecutors who convened at the New York University School of Law as part of an effort to create a “21st century vision” of criminal justice. That event was co-hosted by the Fair and Just Prosecution, a soft-on-crime initiative that receives significant funding from Soros.
“Prosecutors have a responsibility to use the best tools available to them in the pursuit of justice, which is why we are thrilled to work with Fair and Just Prosecution to design new experiential training models that will help move offices past incarceration-driven practices,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, an adviser to Fair and Just Prosecution. In 2021, George appeared in a photograph posted to the Fair and Just Prosecution Facebook page alongside Larry Krasner and Kim Gardner.
The good news is that there are many officials like George who will be facing elections this year, and they know that their policies are deeply unpopular with normal people. “Somehow I have been dreading 2025’s cycle for even longer than I did 2024’s,” Amy Torres told Bolts. She is the executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, which has fought to protect illegal aliens from arrest and detention by obstructing cooperation between local law enforcement and federal agencies.
There are about 160 elections for prosecutors and sheriffs. You can find a list here. Some of them are celebrities among progressives. In Philadelphia, Krasner, who has made it a point to undermine policing, is up for re-election. So is Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the man who made his name by going after President Donald Trump instead of prosecuting street crime in his city.
Every single one of these races matters because sheriffs and prosecutors can exert tremendous influence over a wide range of issues pertaining to local criminal justice systems.
Though George, Krasner, Bragg, and countless others like them are well-funded and backed by powerful people, their policies have proven harmful to the vast majority of Americans. The path for removing them from relevance and power starts not in Washington, D.C., but at home, with your local election.
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