In Vice President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, 71 percent of felony weapons charges filed between 2012 and 2014 were not prosecuted, meaning that in that three-year period, over 8,300 felony weapons charges simply disappeared, the News Journal reports.
Even in cases where someone is charged with being armed while committing some other felony, out of more than 5,300 such charges, 80 percent were not prosecuted during that period, according to the 2012-2014 report by the Delaware Criminal Justice Council.
Prosecutors try to justify their actions by claiming that dropping gun charges sometimes lets them win convictions on other lesser charges, but batting averages aren’t everything: Had Delaware prosecutors convicted two-time convicted felon and murder suspect Mateo Pinkston of the three weapons charges he faced in 2012, Pinkston still would have been in jail when, police say, he shot and killed mother of two Arteise Brown, 25, last year.
