Four years ago, Los Angeles County voters elected George Gascón to take the district attorney’s office in a bold and constructive new direction. He believes that the DA, uniquely, has the power and responsibility to make the justice system fairer. He agreed with them that sentences should be long enough to protect the community and end the cycle of violence, incarceration, retribution and recidivism, and not just to inflict the greatest punishment.
They elected him at the end of a year of pandemics, lockdowns, police killings, social justice protests, political anxiety and disruption on a scale unprecedented in decades. It is a time of both possibility and danger. LA County voters voted for the type of systemic change that Gascón is offering.
The pushback was immediate and strong, first from prosecutors and police officers who felt threatened by the new approach, and soon by political opportunists nationwide who used Gascón as a caricature of the DA who stole criminals to cause fear of crime and disorder.
The strike continued, even after two failed recall attempts to qualify for the election. It seems as if every crime trend, every failure of policing or law-making (which Gascón has not achieved) is laid at his feet.
Now voters must decide whether to stick with Gascón’s reformist orientation or retreat to a failed mindset where justice is defined by the harshest charges and the longest sentences.
Voters would be wise to move forward, not backward. He would be wise to re-elect Gascón against Nathan Hochman’s retreat policy.
He’s right about the American justice system: It’s expensive and unparalleled but it doesn’t promise. It dispenses justice unequally, favoring people with financial resources who can, for example, afford to pay bail instead of sitting in jail waiting for trial. It perpetuates the racist biases that mar our history and punishes more Blacks and Latinos more severely, including the death penalty, than whites who commit the same crimes. It is too often to treat children as offenders as adults, not considering that their still developing brains are criminally responsible and have greater opportunities for rehabilitation.
The death penalty is a good example of the reorientation of the Gascón office. Before he was elected, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office sought and obtained more death sentences than its counterparts across the country. Even though the state doesn’t execute people, LA County prosecutors still seek convictions, a sign that they are tough on crime. In doing so, they exclude jurors who oppose the death penalty on principle – and therefore, research shows, are likely to be more skeptical of all the evidence against defendants.
Gascón reformed the conviction review unit, helping to identify, so far, 14 innocent people who have been tried, convicted and imprisoned. Independence – and partial redemption from a justice system that fails to do justice – is the result of a reform program.
He adopted a policy against gratuitous and duplicative sentence improvement, including, for example, extra time for the defendant who used a gun when the charge has included armed robbery, or for gang affiliation. They require juveniles to be tried and sentenced in juvenile court, as they should be, and as the current state law generally is, and not adult court, except in rare exceptions.
Gascón’s critics say this “blanket” policy is an abuse of prosecutorial discretion, but in fact the opposite is true. As with the prohibition of the death penalty, they exercise judgment and discretion, and a statement to the prosecutor and the public how the office will do its work. Although he was criticized for being inflexible, Gascón allowed himself to occasionally depart from these guidelines in exceptional circumstances.
Hochman, a former federal prosecutor, called Gascón a “flawed messenger” of criminal justice reform and said he would do a more responsible job of implementing reform policies.
But at the same time he vowed to reverse the policy. If he is elected, he said, there will be no ban on the death penalty, increased sentences or trying juveniles as adults.
“I will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law,” he told the editorial board, and “I will not let violent criminals go before they serve their full sentence.” The statement sounds like the type of “blanket policy” criticized in Gascón, although on the “tough on crime” side of the list rather than the “measured justice” side.
Hochman argued that they are not a blanket policy and that prosecuting to the “full extent of the law” does not mean that he will file every charge or seek the longest sentence. Then what does it mean?
He said he used his discretion to take into account the facts of each case. That is the job of every prosecutor.
But in providing guardrails against extreme charges and sentences, Gascón has recognized what Hochman did not – that without a clear policy that limits the decision to submit, hundreds of prosecutors will deviate to the most extreme sentences. Too much, which means veering away from justice. This would be the wrong direction for LA County.
