Restorative Justice Or Justice Denied? With D.A. Gascón, Teens Tried As Adults Get A Second Chance
LAPPL News Watch
September 7, 2021
When
he saw a Los Angeles police detective walking toward his mother’s
doorstep this year, Guillermo Orellana feared the worst. The sight
called him back to 2013, when the same investigator pulled Orellana’s
mother aside in a hospital room and delivered a grim message: his
younger sibling, Kevin, had been stabbed to death by two brothers on a
Reseda handball court in what police would term a gang-related killing.
Now the detective was telling the Orellana family that one of the
brothers — a teen at the time of the murder — would probably be
resentenced as a juvenile due to a combination of a change in California
law and newly elected L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón’s policy of
refusing to try teens as adults.
The defendant, who had been sentenced
to 16 years to life in 2015, will now probably be released before 2022.
“They killed my brother. We’re not going to get him back,” Guillermo
Orellana said. “Now it makes you feel like they’re doing it again.”
In
2016, California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 57, a sweeping
criminal justice reform bill that barred prosecutors from trying
juveniles as adults without a judge’s approval. That same law allowed
previously convicted juvenile defendants whose cases were directly filed
in adult court to retroactively seek what is known as a transfer
hearing, in which prosecutors have to convince a judge the defendant
should have been tried as an adult.
If a judge rules such a case should
have been tried in juvenile court, then those previously convicted
defendants are resentenced to far shorter prison terms, as defendants in
juvenile court cannot be held past the age of 25.
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