L.A. County’s new D.A. Jaskon has introduced a number of lenient sentencing policies since taking office, raising strong questions from all walks of Life.
On March 16, the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office announced another waiver of seeking the death penalty for a repeat offender, Alexander Hernandez, who is accused of killing five people. Hernandez, 40, was charged with 11 counts of attempted murder, eight counts of shooting at a passenger vehicle, three counts of animal cruelty, two counts of felony possession of a weapon, and one count of felony negligent discharge of a firearm and one count of felony possession of ammunition, in addition to the five people he killed in 2014.
George Gascon, the new Los Angeles County District Attorney, has been in office for only three months and is facing motions to recall from victims and district attorney organizations, and his policy of promoting lenient sentencing for many crimes has raised strong questions from all walks of life.
At the beginning of his term, Gascon, who is supposed to be committed to fighting crime and protecting people’s lives and property, issued a number of directives that shocked the community, including: dropping death penalty claims, dropping special aggravated charges, not requiring cash bail, dropping the prosecution of several misdemeanors; requiring that criminals who commit gang murders, massacres, serial rapes, and multiple murders be incarcerated if they are violent juveniles offenders until they are over the age of 25, etc.
Death Penalty Waived in Multiple Homicide Cases
According to City News Service, at least three homicide cases that have attracted widespread attention have been dropped by L.A. County prosecutors at Jascon’s direction.
One of the crimes occurred in 1983 when suspect Kenneth Earl Gay killed a Los Angeles police officer in Lake View Terrace. In the second, gang member Michael Christopher Mejia is accused of killing a Family member in East Los Angeles and then shooting two Whittier police officers, killing one and injuring another. The two victims died less than a year apart.
Hernandez now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole after the district attorney dropped his bid for a death sentence. He is accused of killing three people in one day on Aug. 24, 2014: Gloria Tovar, 59, who died in her car in Pacoima. She was waiting to pick up a friend for church; Mariana Franco, 22, was driving with her Parents when an SUV pulled up and someone in the car said in Spanish, “I’m going to kill you.” Then a shot was fired at Franco’s head. Frank’s parents were also shot, but survived. One other victim, 29-year-old Michael Planells, was shot and killed in a Sylmar parking lot.
Hernandez is also suspected in other unsolved cases, including a May 14, 2014 drive-by in which the teenager had just dropped off his girlfriend from a school dance and was waiting for a green light at an intersection when a car pulled up and a man in it shot him in the spine, paralyzing him.
D.A. reveals retaliation by Jascon’s work
Richard Doyle, a senior prosecutor in Compton’s office, said Jascon asked him to drop a lawsuit against anti-police protesters once he took office, and was punitively reassigned after he challenged it with reprimands and retaliation, FOX11 reported.
The newspaper said Doyle had never had a blemish on his record in his 34 years as a prosecutor. But last December, Jascon convicted him of insubordination in his first week on the job.
At the Time, Doyle was in charge of the prosecution against three anti-police protesters accused of trying to derail a train during a protest near the Compton police station last Nov. 15. According to a video obtained by FOX11, there are three sets of train tracks near the station, a Union Pacific line and two Metro lines. At the end of the protest, several defendants tugged on a wire barricade set up by police to block the tracks. A few minutes later, officers noticed the situation and quickly ran over to move the barricade away from the tracks. 15 seconds later, a train passed by the location.
All three men were later charged with felony attempted train sabotage and, if convicted, will be sentenced to life in prison without parole. In addition, the three men were also charged with one felony count of unlawful obstruction of railroad tracks, which carries a possible sentence of two to four years in prison.
However, Black Lives Matter and anti-police activists have launched a social media campaign to protest the charges against one of the three defendants, Emanuel Padilla. Because part of the footage of Padilla dragging the barricade was blocked by some tree branches, it was incomplete.
However, Doyle said the surveillance video clearly shows the two defendants picking up the barricade and then dragging it over. Also, there were LAPD officers who witnessed Padilla helping to pull the barricade across the tracks. And, after his arrest three days later for participating in a protest in front of the sheriff’s Home, Padilla admitted that he did drag the barricade across the train tracks at that time. But he said his intent was not to crash a train, but that he thought doing so might cause electrical problems with the train.
Doyle said they got an expert from Union Pacific to testify that that barrier could have caused the train to derail.
According to video posted by Jascon himself, he met with anti-police activists as well as members of the Black Lives Matter group on his first day in office. The next day, just hours after he was sworn in, Doyle received a call from Jascon’s executive team instructing him to drop the charges against Padilla for further investigation. At the time, Doyle argued that the case was well-documented and wondered what more to investigate.
He soon received an email from Jascon, which said: I have authorized Deputy Attorney General Mario Trujillo to instruct you to drop the case against Padilla. It is my understanding that you have refused to do so. Mr. Trujillo will appear in court this afternoon to dismiss the case on my behalf. Later in the courtroom, Trujillo said that “justice” demanded that the case be dismissed.
Shortly afterwards Doyle received a letter of reprimand saying that he had disobeyed Jascon’s order and that this would be permanently recorded in his file. Three weeks later, Doyle was transferred from the Compton office to a much smaller environmental crimes unit farther from his home. Doyle saw this as a retaliatory and punitive transfer.
Murderer of Chinese woman receives lenient sentence
In 2019, an elderly Chinese woman in her 70s in Arcadia was brutally murdered by Heber Enoc Diaz, a Hispanic murderer. Diaz was charged with one count of murder, three counts of burglary, and multiple counts of second-degree robbery and elder abuse resulting in death, and could have faced the death penalty or life in prison without parole.
But two years after the crime, Diaz had the opportunity to receive a lesser sentence of 32 years and four months because of Jascon’s new policy. The district attorney’s office, at Jascon’s direction, moved the judge to drop the special charge of “murder during robbery and burglary” against Diaz.
Nancy Tsai, daughter of Joanne Tsai, who works as a physical therapist, said the murder happened in the home where she grew up. Her mother was brutally attacked when she was killed, and the perpetrator used a hammer, stabbing saw and box cutter to break half her skull, strangled her, and stabbed and slashed her cheeks, upper lip, chin, neck, chest and legs.
Nancy Choi said she was unable to work for three months after the incident, and it took her 21 months to come to terms with the fact that Diaz was not sentenced to death but to life without parole. When she learned that Diaz might still be released from prison, she was afraid that he would again endanger the community and even come to her door to commit murder.
Nancy Choi said earlier this month that she and her sister, Patty Thurlow, had submitted a “victim impact statement” to the prosecution and would speak in court. She wants the judge to know the severity of the killer’s crime and the experience of the last minutes of her mother’s life. In January, Tsenansi joined the panel that removed Jascon from office.
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