A man who boiled a 16-month-old baby alive is among the inmates Texas Senate candidate James Talarico apparently believes “don’t belong in cages.”
Carlnelus Delaney Simmons is serving a 99-year sentence at the Ferguson Prison in Midway, Texas, for murdering his girlfriend’s toddler, Jabraylon Quintez Bables. According to prison records and the website Abuse Angels, Simmons “deliberately dipped” the boy “into a pot of boiling water.” The child survived the initial burning but spent 36 agonizing days fighting for his life before succumbing to his injuries.
Court documents reveal that doctors determined the toddler had been “immersed in a hot liquid and that the burns were not accidental.” Physicians noted it appeared the child “had folded his body into a fetal position to protect himself.” Simmons had a prior homicide conviction for killing a man in a bar fight in 1994.
This is the same prison where Talarico, a 37-year-old Democrat, delivered a graduation speech declaring his vision for abolishing incarceration altogether.
“My experience as a teacher, as a legislator, and as a Christian tells me that birds don’t belong in cages. Children don’t belong in cages. People don’t belong in cages,” Talarico said at the ceremony in 2022.
The candidate didn’t stop there. “Poverty is violence. Pollution is violence. And, yes, prison is violence,” he argued.
Talarico’s soft-on-crime record extends well beyond prison abolition rhetoric. In 2020, amid the BLM riots sweeping the nation, he called the moment a “really exciting” opportunity to “end the current situation of over-policing communities of color which has been in place in this country since its founding.”
The candidate has backed up his words with action, or inaction, depending on how you look at it.
He conveniently missed a vote on “Jocelyn’s Law,” legislation that would have denied bail to illegal immigrants charged with violent crimes. The bill was named for Jocelyn Nungaray, a young girl allegedly abducted, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death by illegal aliens.
Talarico also voted against the Damon Allen Act, named for a Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper murdered by a suspect who was out on bail. And he “proudly” contributed campaign donations to an activist group pushing to defund the Austin police department.
