If you want to see the kind of insanity that happens when Democrats take over the criminal justice system, look no further than the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

This is the story of Michael A. Stokes, a bank robber serving a 73 year sentence, who decided to rename himself Ophelia Azriel De’lonta and pretend to be a woman. And that would be fine. 73 years is close to life and if you’re going to be spending 1983 to 2056 in a cell, then you might as well find creative ways to pass the time, whether it’s befriending a mouse or claiming to the messiah. And since Stokes is now 52, he would 96 by the time he’s released. Which is pretty old to rob banks or star in Gypsy.

But in a Democratic run justice system, it’s not enough for the inmate to be crazy, the court has to be just as crazy as he is.

So this is also the story of the Virginia Department of Corrections which not only allowed Michael Stokes to dress up as a woman, but also paid for his psychological counseling and hormone therapy. But that wasn’t good enough for Ophelia and all the other people living in Michael’s head. He wanted Virginia taxpayers to pay to castrate him in the hopes that would finally turn him into a woman.

While Virginia taxpayers might have been open to castrating Stokes, they weren’t willing to pay $20,000 to do it, when a good veterinarian could do it for 50 bucks and a shot of whiskey.

And the story would have ended there, but then the ACLU came on the scene and sued the Virginia Department of Corrections for not providing “medical treatment” for Stokes’ problem, by which they did not mean electroshock therapy or hiring an exorcist.

Around this time Michael A. Stokes tried to manually castrate himself, which would have saved the State of Virginia even more money, but he failed at that as badly as he failed at bank robbery or being a man.

Clearly this was proof that Stokes’ big heaping bag of crazy was a serious medical condition that required immediate castration by competent professionals.

“This is not a choice. Transsexuals are born and not made,” said psychiatry professor George R. Brown at East Tennessee State University, an expert in gender identity disorder. “If you didn’t have this condition, why would you want to have your genitals removed, if not by a competent surgeon but by your own hand?”

I’m not a professor of psychiatry, but I will go ahead and guess that it’s a symptom of a severe mental breakdown. Crazy people also try to chop off their fingers. Does that mean they were really born fish?

Assuming that the things that crazy people do to themselves establishes some form of genetic identity is well… crazy.

Stokes had a criminal record that included 17 different convictions. He was found guilty of robbery seven times, three times for weapons violations, one for malicious wounding, one for sodomy, and two for drug offenses. And apparently some of these crimes were even carried out to raise money for his sex change operation.

Now that he was in prison, Michael switched to holding up the taxpayers to pay for his plan to become a woman using the ACLU as his gun.

But the craziness marched on to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Hearing the case were Justice Diana Gribbon Motz, the first woman from Maryland to sit on the Fourth Circuit, Justice Albert Diaz, the first Puerto Rican to sit on the Fourth Circuit and Justice Robert Bruce King, who, unless he got a sex change operation or moved to Puerto Rico, would always be just another white guy.

King and Motz were Clinton nominees. Diaz was an Obama nominee who was nearly kept off the bench by a Republican filibuster but who made it anyway. And brilliant legal scholar that he is, Diaz wrote an opinion claiming that the failure to castrate Stokes violates the Eight Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment provision thereby making it Unconstitutional

This is your justice system. This is your justice system on crack.

De’lonta’s complaint alleges that, in light of their knowledge of her ongoing risk of self-mutilation, Appellees’ continued denial of consideration for sex reassignment surgery constitutes deliberate indifference to her serious medical need in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

…just because Appellees have provided De’lonta with some treatment consistent with the GID Standards of Care, it does not follow that they have necessarily provided her with constitutionally adequate treatment.

…although Appellees and the district court are correct that a prisoner does not enjoy a constitutional right to the treatment of his or her choice, the treatment a prison facility does provide must nevertheless be adequate to address the prisoner’s serious medical need.

There is a story about the family who lets a boy pretend to be a chicken because they needed the eggs. The left has similarly become entangled in insanity because it needs the power that comes from it.

Who is the real lunatic in this story?

Is it Michael Stokes, the bank robber who tried to castrate himself with some disposable razor blades and who gets upset every time he sees his female therapist? Or is it Diana, Albert and Robert? Or is it the entire system that pandered to the insanity of a mentally ill man instead of sending him to a mental institution, and that will end up spending 20 grand to castrate him because the failure to castrate a criminal who wants to be castrated is now considered to be an Unconstitutional form of Cruel and Unusual Punishment?

The Founders would have considered castrating a criminal to clearly be Cruel and Unusual Punishment. But Liberalism, in its infinite wisdom, considers it a civil right.