A prior felony? I'm shocked

ONCE AGAIN, another killing - this time a double murder - in the city. Once again, the murderer has at least one prior violent felony conviction.

Mustafa Ali has allegedly confessed to killing two armored-car security guards while they were collecting money from an ATM in Northeast Philadelphia.

He has a federal conviction for bank robbery. He served just six of the seven years he was sentenced to in 1993, followed by seven years of supervised release after he was paroled in 1999.

Obviously, he wasn't being supervised too closely. He was already wanted on a felony warrant for using a bad check to buy the car used in the robbery. Yet no one could find him.

Let's recap, shall we, to show how pathetically ineffective the criminal justice system can be.

Mustafa Ali is arrested for a violent felony, bank robbery, in 1993. He is sentenced to just seven years. He only serves six and is released in 1999 with supervision for another seven years.

He subsequently steals a car by passing a bad check for the deposit, is wanted on a bench warrant and can't be found, even though he was a known felon who was, until very recently, supervised by a parole officer!

A violent criminal convicted of robbing eight banks is sentenced to only seven years, serves only six and who was supposedly supervised by authorities for another seven, goes on to defraud a dealer out of a car and allegedly kill the two guards.

We know the justice system in Philadelphia is dysfunctional. Apparently, this attitude has infected the federal system in Philadelphia as well, because Mustafa Ali was doing federal time.

The federal courts are supposed to be stricter than state and county courts. Are the local judges appointed to the federal bench so steeped in Philadelphia's lenient criminal-justice system that they take their bad habits with them?

This leads to another issue.

When are judges, probation departments and parole boards going to be held accountable for the carnage they create?

I've written in the past about this. These entities seem to be immune from the consequences of their actions.

When are the "experts" going to be held accountable for their part? Why is it that the criminologists and sociologists are never condemned for the failed solutions that they continue to recommend?

When will our political leaders be held accountable? How many times will Philadelphia political leaders keep blaming guns instead of political cronies in the courts, prisons, police, probation and parole departments?

Why are the political parties not judged by who they appoint to the courts, elect to the bench, nominate for DA and appoint as U.S. attorneys?

THERE IS something seriously wrong with a system in which, during the 1990s, half of all law-enforcement officers killed in the line of duty were murdered by people with a prior conviction for a felony.

A parolee or a felon on probation were responsible for murdering 20 percent of all law enforcement officers.

There is something seriously wrong with a system where two of three murderers sentenced to be executed had a prior felony conviction and nearly 10 percent had a prior homicide conviction.

There is something seriously wrong with a criminal-justice system where approximately 28 percent of convicted felons were sentenced to probation with no jail or prison time.

There is something seriously wrong with a system in which, despite rapidly increasing violent crime rates, the average state sentence for a violent felony declined from 1994 to 2004.

The citizens of this country need to restore some sanity to the criminal justice system. The public must hold judges, probation departments, parole boards, DAs, prison officials, police - even journalists - accountable.

Simply put, when these institutions fail, as they have, there have to be wholesale changes - in policies, procedures and, most important, their personnel. *

Michael P. Tremoglie is a former Philadelphia police officer and the author of "A Sense of Duty," available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.