George Gascón’s arrogance finally catches up with him – Orange County Register

Things aren’t looking good for George Gascón. The results of the primary and recent Surveys show he is likely to be replaced as Los Angeles County District by Nathan Hochman. Much of this is his fault: he has demonstrated a lack of common sense and poor leadership skills.

In a recent interview with Gascón, in which I participated along with members of this publication’s editorial board, Gascón seemed to be on the defensive throughout. He didn’t take responsibility for any of his questionable decisions. Instead, he repeatedly blamed public misunderstandings about the crime situation in Los Angeles County, which he said were created by his well-funded political opposition.

Gascón didn’t make things too difficult for his opponent as he made plenty of mistakes that easily grabbed headlines. We will come back to this shortly.

Many of Gascón’s actions are extremely justifiable. Almost immediately after taking office, Gascón ordered his prosecutors to stop asking for bail for some minor crimes.

Yes, it seems unfair that rich people are released while poor people have to stay in prison while they await trial.

He ordered his staff to stop calling for the death penalty. That’s right – there are too many problems with the implementation of the death penalty and it leads to too many injustices.

Gascón stopped prosecuting people under 18 as adults. Sure, teenagers’ brains are very underdeveloped, which affects their decision-making ability and therefore reduces their culpability – that’s the point of juvenile courts.

Setting aside concerns that Gascón’s mandates undermined the potential benefits of prosecutorial discretion, many of his actions are entirely justified. The problem is that he botched so many individual decisions.

A clear example of this is his lack of common sense in his handling of the Hannah Tubbs case – Tubbs, who had a history of violent crimes, received a very lenient two-year sentence for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old Girls, after Gascón refused to transfer Tubbs’ case to adult court.

While he later admitted that he should have recommended that Tubbs be tried as an adult, it should have been obvious to him at the time since Tubbs had already been convicted of aggravated assault twice and Gascón’s office had prison phone calls showing them It appeared that Tubbs was gloating over an easy sentence. It should have been obvious that Gascón’s blanket policy of trying juveniles as adults was wrong. The original prosecutor tried to introduce the calls as evidence, but Gascón pulled him from the case.

District attorneys in other California counties have done so insulted Gascón and publicly stated that they would not share jurisdiction of cases with him. Most prosecutors in his office voted to support recall attempts against their own boss. Gascón’s arrogance has made it impossible for him to acknowledge the fact that he has gone too far.

He was overly confident that he knew best while forgetting the need to not appear crazy to voters and his prosecutors, which is why he is now likely to lose office. He never took responsibility during the interview. It was always someone else’s fault and there was always an explanation for why an unsavory statistic was unreliable.

He appeared to want to exercise absolute control over his prosecutors, tolerated no dissent and reportedly sidelined those who had raised legitimate concerns. This led to most wanting him gone.

He’s not a leader, he’s a cocky idealist with no leadership skills.

At the start of his term, Gascón ordered his prosecutors not to seek life in prison without parole. Fears about abolishing the death penalty are somewhat alleviated by the alternative of life imprisonment without parole. Gascón doesn’t understand that justice sometimes requires putting people in prison for life. He has focused on the impact that incarceration has on public safety, completely ignoring the fact that sometimes people deserve to be in prison and that victims deserve these criminals to be in prison, namely beyond the impact their detention has on public safety.