George Gascón’s arrogance is finally catching up with him – Daily News

It’s not looking good for George Gascón. Primary and recent results POLLS shows likely to be unseated as Los Angeles County district by Nathan Hochman. Much of it is his fault: he has demonstrated a lack of common sense and poor leadership skills.

In a recent interview of Gascón in which I participated with members of the editorial board of this publication, Gascón seemed to be on the defensive the entire time. He has not taken responsibility for any of his questionable decisions. Instead, he has consistently blamed public misconceptions about the state of crime in LA County that he says have been produced by his well-funded political opposition.

Gascón didn’t make it too difficult for the opposition, given his many blunders that made easy headlines appealing. We will return to these shortly.

Many of Gascón’s policies are highly susceptible. Almost immediately after taking office, Gascón ordered his prosecutors to stop asking for cash bail for some minor crimes.

Yes, it seems unfair that rich people go free while poor people have to stay in jail awaiting trial.

He ordered his staff to stop seeking the death penalty. Right – there are too many problems with the way the death penalty is implemented and it results in too many injustices.

Gascón has stopped trying people under 18 as adults. Sure, teenagers’ brains are very underdeveloped, which affects their decision-making abilities and therefore reduces their blameworthiness—that’s the main purpose of juvenile courts.

Leaving aside concerns that Gascón’s mandates have eliminated the possible benefits of prosecutorial discretion, many of his policies are well justified. The problem is that he got so many individual decisions wrong.

A clear example is when he showed little common sense in the way he handled the Hannah Tubbs case – Tubbs, who already had a history of violent crime, was given a very light sentence of 2 years for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl, after Gascón refused to do. transfer Tubbs’ case to adult court.

Although he later admitted that he should have recommended that Tubbs be tried as an adult, it should have been obvious to him at this point, given that Tubbs had already been convicted twice of aggravated assault and that Gascón’s office he had phone calls to the jail that revealed Tubbs rejoicing. over an easy sentence. It should have been obvious that Gascón’s general policy against trying juveniles as adults was wrong. The original prosecutor he tried to present the calls as evidence, but Gascón threw him out of the case.

District attorneys in other California counties have beaten Gascón and publicly stated that they would not share jurisdiction over the cases with him. Most of the prosecutors in his office voted to support the recall efforts against their own boss. Gascón’s arrogance prevented him from appreciating that he had gone too far.

He was overconfident that he knew best, oblivious to the need not to look crazy to his constituents and prosecutors, which is why he is now likely to lose his position. During the interview, he never took responsibility. It was always someone else’s fault and there was always an explanation for why an unpleasant statistic was unreliable.

He apparently wanted to exercise absolute control over his prosecutors, did not tolerate dissent, and removed those who raised legitimate concerns. This made most of them want him gone.

He is not a leader, he is an overconfident idealist with no leadership skills.

Early in his term, Gascón ordered his prosecutors to stop seeking life without parole. The technique of eliminating the death penalty is somewhat mitigated by the fact that there is the alternative of life without parole. Gascón fails to understand that justice sometimes demands that people be imprisoned for life. He focused on the effects of incarceration on public safety and completely neglected the fact that sometimes people deserve to be in prison and victims deserve those criminals to be in prison beyond the impact that prison has on public safety.