LA’s new DA: parole for everybody!
I wonder how many people in LA County who recently voted to elect George Gascon as their DA were aware that they were voting for a man who believes in the minimum sentences for everyone. It’s hard to believe a majority of Angelenos are for this:
Bruce Davis, a member of the Charles Manson cult, brutally murdered two men and was found guilty. Now, Gascon’s new policy is such that no matter the sentence nor the crime, parole will not be opposed by the DA’s office. Period.
““This Office’s default policy is that we will not attend parole hearings and will support in writing the grant of parole for a person who has already served their mandatory minimum period of incarceration, defined as their MEPD, YEPD or EPD. However, if the CDCR has determined in their Comprehensive Risk Assessment that a person represents a “high” risk for recidivism, the DDA may, in their letter, take a neutral position on the grant of parole.”
Let that sink in.
I think a great many Democratic candidates for office these days are stealth candidates, hiding the extent of their leftism at least to some extent. Obama was the first. I’m not saying that Gascon was hiding the fact that he was a leftist and that he would institute leftist polices if he was elected. But I do think the extremity of what he was planning was hidden. I did a search to discover what Gascon said about parole when he was running for office, and all I’ve found – at least so far – is this from an October 20, 2020 list in a document entitled “GEORGE GASCÓN’S PLAN TO EXPAND DIVERSION, REDUCE INCARCERATION, AND PREVENT RECIDIVISM IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY.” The heading above this paragraph is “Support Parole”:
When a defendant is sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, the law presumes that they will be paroled, after serving the minimum sentence imposed, unless they continue to pose a risk to public safety. Thousands of people serving life sentences have been paroled in recent years and are leading positive, productive lives with an extremely low rate of recidivism. However, under Jackie Lacey, the LA DA has reflexively opposed parole in nearly all cases, even when the person in front of them has clearly demonstrated true change and rehabilitation. As DA, I will fulfill my ethical obligation to follow the law and support second chances for people who have worked hard to improve themselves and no longer pose a risk to public safety.
Certainly doesn’t sound like “Once the minimum has been served, I will never oppose parole no matter what, and I will ban all my prosecutors from ever opposing parole as well.”
At any rate, Gascon’s policy has at least three effects. The first one – described in that first linked article – is to leave families of victims without support from the DA’s office. The second is that it will likely increase LA’s crime rate. The third is that prosecutors in the office who cannot abide these policies will tend to quit, leaving Gascon and those underneath him free to shape the personnel there into the lean mean non-fighting machine he prefers.
It is not easy to determine who is the more insanely unqualified and the more destructive of California’s two Soros-funded DAs, Gascon of LA or Boudin of SF. The latter will soon have two high-profile cases involving very recent and very brutal murders (of the famous private eye Jack Palladino, and of an elderly Thai man), and, in both cases, the accused murderers are young black men.
My brother lives in Northridge (LA) and I’m worried for his safety. He’s almost certainly one of the people who voted for this, but the voters don’t seem to think through the results of what they do.
This was the office that was the most important one on the ballot in L.A.: not Trump/Biden, not House, not anything else. This is the one that had me worried the most. Jackie Lacey was a traditional liberal, and a successful black woman (the left seems to go after such women with a blinding fervor these days), but she wasn’t liberal enough for today’s L.A.
We’re doomed.
Gascon was backed by the Ca Democratic establishment.
And Soros money.
Lacey was heavily outspent.
Voting for a leftist and whining later that you did not know far left he would be is no excuse. Own it, dem voters. Good and hard.
Likely, the response when a dem voter hears about this is, “Great! Why didn’t somebody think of that earlier?”
“it will likely increase LA’s crime rate” neo
There’s no ‘likely’ about it. This is an issue that potentially threatens everyone on a personnal level.
Which leads to me to wonder, when a released convict or an arrestee is released without bail and goes on to rape or murder again…
Whether sooner or later, one of the victim’s relatives/friends is going to hold these leftist ‘prosecutors’ and ‘judges’ personally responsible?
As, would they not be complicit in that rape / murder? Given that they enabled that crime?
Those who give criminals free rein assume responsibility for their crimes. Absent accountability, vigilante justice will, sooner or later arise.
Undeserved mercy to the guilty is intentional cruelty to the victims.
Geoffrey Britain:
Dukakis and the Willie Horton release.
Ann in L.A. I read somewhere that a recall for Gascon could be arranged, that he has to be in office for ninety days before a petition can begin, and that organizing efforts are already underway. This was a few weeks ago and I haven’t seen any updates. Allowing one of the Manson killers out on parole should have some effect on that.
neo,
Both in quality and in quantity, today we far exceed “Dukakis and the Willie Horton release”. Back then, a Willie Horton was so unusual that Bush coud bludgeon Dukaksis with it. Now, thousands of hardened criminals have been released.
Back then, no one was working to defund the police.
Back then, neither the mass media, democrat party or major corporations were supporting the meme that America, from its very beginning has been and continues to be an intrinsically racist society.
How long till every major police department has mandatory training in Critical Race ‘Theory’? With continued employment dependent upon demonstrated support for it in cop’s thoughts, words and actions…
Remember… “silence is violence”!
Let LA County residents get it good and hard. That’s the only way they will learn. It sucks that innocent people will suffer but that’s kind of unavoidable now.
One of the things shaping our current predicament has been internal migration to major population centers. Two things driving that have been economic opportunity and a declining crime rate. Without that, we’ll either see another population shift or…well, just read up on what it was like to manage Imperial Rome or any other major city in decline.
Mike
Yep, the recall effort is in the organizational stage. Twenty-eight days until they can begin collecting signatures:
http://www.recallgeorgegascon.com
Does anyone have any sources or theories that explain why Soros/Open Society/other leftists think being extremely lenient on very severe crimes is good? I can’t think of anything that doesn’t seem like a conspiracy theory (i.e. Batman villains and burning everything down to create a new utopia). If you really give them the benefit of the doubt, assume they are just true believers in maximum freedom for individuals against state powers ( which doesn’t actually appear to be the case, but let’s assume), how is allowing some of the worst, most dangerous criminals to run free, as a preferred norm, supposed to make a better society?
Pandora. It isn’t. It’s meant to cause chaos, disaffection and destruction. From which the Party will arise triumphant.
Does anyone have any sources or theories that explain why Soros/Open Society/other leftists think being extremely lenient on very severe crimes is good?
Pandora: This is the thin edge of the wedge of the Prison Abolition movement, which has been on the New Left agenda since the early 70s. The want to get rid of prisons entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_abolition_movement#Arguments_made_for_prison_abolition
Some of the arguments are pie-in-the-sky about how terrible prisons are and therefore we should get by without them.
Other arguments, not surprisingly, are based on equity arguments that prisons are particularly oppressive to blacks and minorities and therefore should be abolished.
Boy, all that reading about the New Left and Weather Underground sure paid off!
A true Gulag has never been tried. All the others were just close enough for communist work.
Make the entire county a Gulag run by the inmates. Because, justice!
Here’s Bill Ayers, our favorite domestic terrorist, interviewing a young woman who has written a book, “Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better.”
_________________________________________________
Bill Ayers: What do you hope to contribute to that dialogue with this book?
Maya Schenwar: One of the problems I’ve seen in the mainstream dialogue around this subject is that it often centers on statistics and budgetary arguments and corporations and ideologies – everything but people. At every turn, we hear that the US has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. Or that private prisons (and the corporations and politicians pushing for them) are bad. Those things are true, and we should be talking about them! But I wanted to write a book about what prison does to people, not only those who are incarcerated but also their families and communities. When you start thinking about prison on that core human level, it becomes clear that prison isn’t just a money-waster or a punishment that’s used too often; it’s an inherently violent and destructive institution.
In the book, I focus in particular on the bonds between people and how incarceration severs those bonds…
–“Prison Inflicts Mass Violence”: Bill Ayers Interviews Maya Schenwar”
https://truthout.org/articles/prison-itself-is-inflicting-mass-violence-bill-ayers-interviews-maya-schenwar/
Ironically, Trump was making serious efforts, and inroads, in prison reform.
This is one reason why his support among Black voters—and perhaps more importantly, some Black politicians who noticed and appreciated his efforts—increased so significantly.
(Not that the Democrats would give him any credit for this…or the MSCM would write anything about it…. No, he had to be denigrated and delegitimized at all costs. )
Help is on the way. The FBI received 2 million requests for background checks for firearm purchases in January. Gun shop owners say that 40% of the guns sales have been to first time buyers. All of these violent criminals being released from prison may soon suffer the death penalty at the hands of the people they are attacking.
Folks in prison, their families, their “communities.” The victims of those in prison? Not so much. Because, “justice.”
One theory I have seen about Soros and his project to elect leftist radicals as DAs is to create chaos and drive real estate prices down so that bargains appear later. At his age it is hard to see why he would do this. His son seems to be following the same pattern but I still wonder why.
His previous project was to elect leftist Secretaries of State and that has worked well. The Arizona SoS is a Soros radical and called Trump voters Nazis. She probably had a hand in electing Kelly to the Senate.
I will bet it increases substantially the number of cases the juries recommend “no parole”, and the increased election of “hanging” judges.
Leftism has conquered, thanks to the Gramsci advice. Cloward-Piven’s will soon follow: keep the country shut down due to Covid and its low death rate, making more and more of the non-elite dependent on helicopter money from DC.
Capitol Hill is the neo-Kremlin, with ten-foot fences topped by razor wire, and politically- screened National Guardsmen armed with live ammo to use on their fellow citizens.
We can see it in the news stories: Rep. Wright of TX is said to have just died “with COVID”; only down in the stories is it found that he’d been on chemo for inoperable lung cancer since 2018. I have news for you: 90% of people with lung cancer die of it or with it, and the large majority of smokers do NOT get lung cancer.
Chris & OBH are correct. As I’ve seen quoted on the internet often in various permutations, the justice system not there to protect citizens from criminals, but to protect criminals from citizens.
“Folks in prison, their families, their “communities.” The victims of those in prison? Not so much.” – om
Very often, regardless of race, their families and communities are their primary victims.
However, none of that negates the need for genuine justice system reform — that’s just not what the Left is aiming at. Otherwise, they would praise Trump and support Senator Tim Scott’s bill in Congress (btw, he’s black, but that didn’t matter a bit to BLM Inc.).
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tim-scott-democrats-gop-police-reform-senate
2020-06-24
What was again that about “fortifying the election” to protect minority voters?
To the people of Los Angeles County I say this is what you voted for – you should be happy! You are getting what you voted for good and hard.
“Very often, regardless of race, their families and communities are their primary victims.”
It would seem to depend on the actual crime committed. Unless you are robbing a “community” bank, a “community” quick mart/convenience store, car jacking your neighbor? Snitches get stitches and blood fueds/vengance are never a consequence (not). Gang violence, say in Chicago ring any bells?
Domestic violence, prostitution, drug dealing, loan sharking/gambling, well, those may actually be predation of one’s own tribe/clan/”community,” although some libertarians would argue those are not crimes?
But the Soros DAs and their fans talk about “community based justice.” I’ve heard that in the third world that often winds up without “western” judicial standards, and “trees with strange fruit.” Communities and mobs are seldom wrong about the guilty and innocent? Because, systemic racism, and ‘justice!”