Gascón

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón is expected to advance to a November runoff, but it’s too early to tell who his challenger will be. Although polls show Gascón has grown deeply unpopular with a significant portion of L.A. County residents, polls and local political observers have suggested that his strong progressive base will carry him out of a crowded primary field replete with challengers who spent more time attacking him than they did defining their own candidacies. Four years after taking office on a…

George Gascón was elected Los Angeles County district attorney in 2020, a convulsive year in which Americans’ lives were upended by the pandemic and public confidence in the criminal justice system was shaken by the murder of George Floyd. The latter led to a reckoning over racial inequity in arrests, prosecutions and punishment. Voters wanted Gascón to set a corrective course in the nation’s largest local jurisdiction while keeping people safe.He is doing what he promised, and doing it well, despite intense and…

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón said Friday he would not prosecute sheriff’s deputies who shot teenagers in two separate killings that drew widespread protests in South L.A. in recent years. The deputies who gunned down 16-year-old Anthony Weber and 18-year-old Andres Guardado will not face criminal charges in either slaying, according to documents the district attorney’s office made public Friday. In both cases, deputies claimed they saw the teens reaching for weapons, but in one case no gun was recovered…

An L.A. County prosecutor on Monday was awarded $1.5 million in a retaliation lawsuit against Dist. Atty. George Gascón. It is a grim omen for the county’s top prosecutor, who faces at least a dozen similar civil claims.Shawn Randolph, the former head of the juvenile division of the district attorney’s office, claimed she was shuttled off to the parole division for pushing back against some of Gascón’s shifts to the handling of criminal cases involving minors, including his blanket ban on trying juveniles as adults.…

More than a dozen QAnon adherents rubbed shoulders with conservative journalists and bloggers at an undisclosed Phoenix location in August, gathering to hear new allegations from a far-right group convinced the 2020 election was stolen.Dubbed “the Pit,” the event was hosted by True the Vote, a group of election deniers who funded and appeared in the long-debunked propaganda film “2000 Mules” by right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, which purported to prove that then-President Trump lost his bid for a second term because…