A Media Savvy Deputy DA Is Leading A Noisy Crusade Against George Gascón
LAPPL News Watch
April 16, 2021
On March 9, the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends aired
a blistering segment attacking newly elected Los Angeles District
Attorney George Gascón and his decision to bar prosecutors from pursuing
the death penalty against a pair of accused child murderers.
The guest
for the segment was Jon Hatami, head of the DA’s child abuse unit and
the lead prosecutor on the case.
If it is unusual for a prosecutor to
batter his boss on national TV, it is extraordinary for one to say, as
Hatami did that morning, “We now have a district attorney who is
pro-criminal, anti-victim, and who refuses to follow the law.”
But these
are extraordinary times in the Los Angeles DA’s office. Gascón unseated
incumbent Jackie Lacey in November and vowed to shake things up inside
the nation’s largest local prosecutor’s office. And on his first day on
the job, he delivered with a dizzying set of reforms, from suspending
the death penalty to getting rid of cash bail to ending the practice of
charging juveniles as adults.
The backlash has been as big and dramatic
as the implications of the changes; it has been furious and,
increasingly, politically opportunistic. Less than three months into his
term, the 67-year-old Gascón faces a recall effort launched by
law-enforcement officials and the families of crime victims, including
the aunt of ten-year-old Anthony Avalos, the boy whose murder Hatami
lamented in the sensational death-penalty segment on Fox & Friends.
Gay rights advocates took Gascón to task for scrapping sentencing
enhancements for hate crimes. (He later reversed his decision.)
He’s
been rapped by a judge and his own deputy DAs for dismissing gang
enhancements and firearm allegations from pending cases, and for his
pronounced preference for social-justice-minded outsiders over veteran
prosecutors on his leadership team.
Recently, there have been votes of
no confidence from the city councils of Beverly Hills and Santa Clarita.
1 comment:
Gascon is not crazy. He is a hard-core committed leftist. He didn't hide it. He reveled in it. The idiots in SF knew that when they voted him in. The idiots in L A knew that when they voted him in. If you buy an alligator and keep it in your swimming pool you have no right to complain when it eats your cat and bites you on the ass when you go swimming.
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