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While handing down a harsh sentence to a Harlem man this week, a New York judge managed to deride the Black Lives Matter movement by telling the defendant, “Black lives don’t matter to Black people with guns.”

Justice Edward McLaughlin gave a 24 to 26 year sentence to Tareek Arnold, who escaped police custody after shooting rival Jamal McCaskill in the summer of 2015, The New York Post reports. Arnold, 24, was convicted of escape, attempted murder, gun possession, and assault. McCaskill, 39, was also in court, but defended Arnold by claiming he wasn’t the shooter. Surveillance cameras proved otherwise.

Via The New York Post:

“Black lives matter,” Justice Edward McLaughlin told defendant Tareek Arnold, 24, as he sentenced him in Manhattan Supreme Court. “I have heard it, I know it, but the sad fact is in this courtroom, so often what happens is manifestations of the fact that black lives don’t matter to black people with guns.”

Defense lawyer Mark Jankowitz requested the minimum of 10 years in light of Arnold’s one-year-old son, according to the report:

McLaughlin demurred: “Do not ask a judge in this room, in this building, or in this system to somehow make amends for the people who commit violent acts and who by their violent acts wind up leaving people orphaned, abandoned, fatherless, etc.”

Judge McLaughlin is reported to be a strong advocate against gang and gun violence in Harlem. In 2011, the judge called for residents to start mobilizing their neighborhoods by removing guns from their homes: ‘When someone fires a pistol in Harlem, the person almost always is a resident,’ the judge said. ‘The person fired at is a resident. When a person is killed, or paralyzed for life, the person is a resident of that community.”

SOURCE: New York Post | VIDEO CREDIT: Inform

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