MSNBC Edits Headline After Enraging Critics with Original Saying Laken Riley’s Killer ‘Never Stood a Chance’: ‘What the F**k Is This S**t?’
Screenshot via MSNBC
MSNBC altered a headline about the murderer of Laken Riley amid critics piling on the network on social media, accusing them of giving a puffy spin to a brutal murder.
José Ibarra was sentenced on Wednesday for the killing of Riley, a Georgia nursing student. Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan in the country illegally, was sentenced to life without parole. Riley was just 22 when she was murdered.
In a Thursday post about the conviction, an MSNBC headline originally read: “Laken Riley’s killer never stood a chance.” The actual post mainly focuses on the fact that Ibarra’s defense team had “no chance” due to the evidence stacked against him.
“For the defense, this was a hopeless case. The defense did the best it could with bad facts. It almost surely knew it was going to lose. That’s probably why it requested a bench (judge-only) trial instead of a jury trial,” legal analyst Danny Cevallos wrote.
He concluded his post by writing, “Sometimes defense counsel just gets handed a truly awful, unwinnable case. The defense’s choice of a bench trial not only saved the state the resources of a wasted jury trial; it also likely avoided unnecessarily prolonging this traumatic experience for the victim’s family.”
The headline has been updated to read: “The guilt of Laken Riley’s killer was never in doubt.”
The previous framing, however, enraged critics on social media who mainly took to sharing screenshots of the original headline and then arguing MSNBC was attempting to be too sympathetic despite Cevallos arguing Ibarra’s guilt was never in doubt.
“What the fuck is this shit,” podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan wrote on X, formerly Twitter, in reaction.
Multiple lawmakers like Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) also weighed in.
Donald Trump Jr. went further, accusing MSNBC of “depravity” and being “sick” for the first headline.
Cevallos noted in his piece that Ibarra’s case had become a political lightning rod for Republicans wanting to bring more focus to illegal immigration, but the case was ultimately straight forward when it came to the facts establishing Ibarra’s guilt.
“For all the political controversy surrounding Jose Ibarra, the case against him was always a simple one,” he wrote, adding the case was always expected to end in a guilty verdict and a life sentence without parole.
