In perhaps the least surprising outcome of this election cycle, incumbent Democrat George Gascon got a shellacking Tuesday from his opponent, independent Nathan Hochman, in the race for Los Angeles County district attorney, losing by 62% to 38%.
The writing was on the wall for Gascon, as LA voters not only twice unsuccessfully tried to recall him but 74% of primary voters also voted for candidates other than Gascon in April.
It turns out that voters do indeed want a safe county, unburdened by violent crime. Voters correctly blamed Gascon for the tsunami of crime he unleashed through his pro-criminal policies.
Hochman, a former Republican running against Gascon as an independent, prosecuted drug dealers, human traffickers, and corrupt public officials as an assistant U.S. attorney in California. He ran the Justice Department’s tax division in the final year of George W. Bush’s eight-year presidency.
Gascon, one of the highest-profile rogue prosecutors whose campaigns got fundraising boosts from liberal financier George Soros, stubbornly maintained that crime had fallen during his tenure overseeing the largest district attorney’s office in the nation.
But that wasn’t true, and everyone knew it. During the one and only debate last month between Gascon and Hochman, moderators cited statistics on violent crime from the California Department of Justice and the Los Angeles Police Department for 2019 to 2023 that showed crime rose each year under Gascon’s tenure.
As we wrote here, you know you’re in trouble politically when, as a left-wing candidate, the media figures moderating a political debate essentially call you a liar.
Gascon’s loss was inevitable the moment he unveiled his sweeping pro-criminal, anti-victim, cop-hating directives during his first week in office. It was only a matter of time.
The utter scope and breadth of Gascon’s policies were stunning. Each of them inured to the benefit of criminals and ignored or punished victims. No civil society, even one with uber-liberal values, could tolerate for long the degradation of law and order that came as a result of the district attorney’s policies.
Over the years, Gascon has been sued by dozens of his own prosecutors, including for creating a hostile work environment, for workplace retaliation, and for discrimination, defamation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Gascon has lost almost all of those cases, costing Los Angeles County millions of dollars.
A whopping 97.2% of the front-line prosecutors who are members of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County, voted to support Gascon’s recall in 2022.
The union, which consists of over 900 prosecutors, also sued Gascon several times, including for allegedly violating the state’s public records act and for forcing prosecutors to violate state law by not charging enhancements or allegations in appropriate cases. These lawsuits won at the trial court level and await a decision by the California Supreme Court.
Before Gascon’s policies disappear into a memory hole, we thought it would be helpful to list some of his most insane directives, which we wrote about here, discussed in our book “Rogue Prosecutors,” and discussed at length here in The Heritage Foundation’s documentary on crime.
Gascon’s directives, applicable to all 900-plus prosecutors in his office:
- Prohibited prosecutors from charging 13 specific misdemeanors and gave them discretion to refuse to prosecute hundreds of other misdemeanor crimes on the books.
- Prohibited prosecutors from requesting cash bail for any misdemeanor, nonserious felony, or nonviolent offense, regardless of the accused’s criminal history. To make matters worse, prosecutors couldn’t oppose a defense counsel’s motion to remove or modify a defendant’s condition of release; nor could prosecutors oppose a defense counsel’s request that a judge not issue a bench warrant against a defendant for not showing up.
- Prohibited prosecutors from filing sentencing enhancements or allegations, regardless of the underlying facts in a case. The California Legislature passed dozens of sentencing enhancements to be used when a criminal commits a crime against specific classes of individuals, such as children, women, the elderly, and others, and when aggravating circumstances exist such as using a firearm or being a repeat offender.
- Prohibited prosecutors from charging violent juveniles as adults, regardless of the crime, including murder and child rape.
- Established a unit in the District Attorney’s Office to look for cases of “injustice” and “racial injustice” in convictions the office earned over the decades.
- Prohibited prosecutors from asking for the death penalty in any case.
- Established a unit called the Conviction Integrity Unit to work “independently” to unwind and dissolve the office’s convictions over the decades in cases where the “interests of justice” require review and reversal.
- Established a resentencing unit requiring prosecutors to “reevaluate and consider for resentencing people who have already served 15 years in prison.” This applied to murderers, child and adult rapists, gang members, and anyone convicted by the office and sentenced to life without parole, life, or a determinate sentence of decades. The directive also required prosecutors to “join the defendant’s motion to strike all alleged sentence enhancements” for pending cases.
- Prohibited prosecutors from attending parole hearings.
- Required prosecutors “to support in writing” a convict’s request for grant of parole if he or she “already served their mandatory minimum period of incarceration.”
Gascon’s political demise is the natural and probable consequence of his policies, which are emblematic of the broader rogue prosecutor movement underwritten by Soros, the liberal financier. This movement continues to be the worst social experiment of recent decades. It is an avoidable social pandemic.
Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Hatami, an outspoken and brave critic of Gascon, provided us with the following statement:
The four-year reign of George Gascon is finally over. He will go down as the worst DA in LA County history. It is now time to get back to what a real DA is supposed to do—follow the law, support victims, prioritize public safety, and prosecute crime. I stand ready to work with Nathan Hochman to do just that.
Hatami was featured at a Heritage Foundation-sponsored crime symposium in Los Angeles, as shown here, along with Deputy District Attorney Eric Siddall and former Deputy District Attorney Kathleen Cady.
Gascon joins a long list of rogue rejects, including Chesa Boudin, Marilyn Mosby, Rachel Rollins, and Kim Gardner, who were either recalled, lost their election, or resigned in disgrace. Kim Foxx of Chicago, the first Soros-funded rogue prosecutor to be elected, chose not to run again as rising crime rates in Chicago became a political albatross for Democrats, who in August held their national convention in her city.
Of the eight most notorious Soros-funded rogue prosecutors featured in our book, only Larry Krasner of Philadelphia and Alvin Bragg of New York remain in office.
The other six have been vanquished. Krasner and Bragg won’t be far behind them, if voters in their cities also hold them accountable for rising crime rates as a result of their ill-conceived policies.