The Wisconsin commissioner who approved the alleged Waukesha SUV killer, Darrell Brooks’, bail was reassigned. WISN 12 News reported that Cedric Cornwall, the commissioner, has been removed from criminal cases and will now only be assigned to small claims or children’s cases.
Milwaukee County Chief Judge Mary Triggiano reportedly said that Cornwall has been assigned to a “non-criminal calendar.”
Cornwall approved a $1,000 bail for Brooks in early November after he was accused of running over the mother of his child with the same red SUV he used to kill six participants in the Waukesha Christmas Parade on November 21. Cornwall approved the low amount of cash bail despite Brooks’ past conviction of bail jumping in 2020.
Some believe that this poor handling of violent crime is an issue that is long overdue to be addressed in Milwaukee County. In an interview with Fox News, Bill Osmulski, a researcher at the Wisconsin-based MacIver Institute, said, “The charges [in Milwaukee County] downplay the severity of the crime. A real popular one that I’ve come across is second-degree reckless endangering of safety.”
Osmulski also touched on the Brooks’ situation specifically, questioning why the earlier November charge wasn’t an attempted murder. He said, “The big part of that story was that he was out on $1,000 bail. What did he do? He ran his girlfriend over in an SUV, and that was charged as second-degree reckless endangering of safety.”
“Those are two crimes where a layperson might say, ‘That sounds like attempted murder to me,’ but in the Milwaukee County court system, that’s second-degree reckless endangering of safety,” he continued.
According to FOX6, in addition to setting a low bail with the “pretrial risk assessment that said he was very high risk for committing a new crime,” the court failed to record the hearing from November 5. A court administrator told FOX6 Investigators that “[t]here are no recordings” because of some “technical issues” that the court experienced.
FOX6 reported, “The office that handles court reporting services blames either human error or a technical malfunction on the loss of recordings from November 5, 7, and 8, but a spokesman for the Wisconsin Supreme Court says intake and bail hearings before court commissioners are not required to be recorded word-for-word.”
Brooks’ criminal history was much more extensive than just jumping bail. The Wisconsin Daily Star reported, “In late 2011, Brooks was also convicted of a felony for the second offense of possession of marijuana. Brooks has two pending charges from 2020 for second degree reckless endangerment and possession of a firearm, which was illegal following his felony conviction.”
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Hayley Feland is a reporter with The Minnesota Sun and The Wisconsin Daily Star | Star News Network. Follow Hayley on Twitter or like her Facebook page. Send news tips to [email protected].
Photo “Cedric Cornwall” by Cornwall for Judge. Background Photo “Darrell Brooks” by The Hill.
