Friday, April 16, 2021

LOOK FOR CRAZY GASCON TO FIRE THE HEAD OF HIS CHILD ABUSE UNIT

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:

bob walsh said...

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.