Bari Weiss's next hit job
"Could George Gascon be the next Chesa Boudin?" asks the Internet's smartest pundit.
“Could George Gascon be the next Chesa Boudin? Amazing reporting from @petersavodnik” Bari Weiss just tweeted about a story published on “Common Sense,” possibly the dumbest place on the Internet.
Totally amazing! Wow!
The story starts with a vivid description of a gruesome murder: A young man kidnapped and beaten to death, his body recovered in a canyon, identifiable only by a tattoo his mother recognized.
The post then weaponizes this horrific crime to slander Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon for seeking a *mere* 25 years for the men.
The new D.A. [Gascon], Stirling explained, had issued nine directives that, among other things, eliminated “enhancements”—extra penalties for more serious crimes. Stirling had been hoping for life without parole for “the three heavies.” (The other two defendants were not thought to have played a central role in the murder.) But without the enhancement—Julian Andrade hadn’t simply been murdered but murdered during the commission of a kidnapping—the best they could hope for, he said, was 25 years in prison, which probably meant 20, since convicts often wind up serving 80 percent of their sentence.
Yes. Gascon is “soft-on-crime” because he’s seeking paltry quarter of a century sentences. You can just see the cost-benefit analysis in the heads of future murderers: “Hey, if I murder someone, I’ll be in prison until I’m 60! That’s cool.”
First of all, all DA’s, conservatives and murder-loving hippies alike, downgrade charges to attain a guilty plea instead of going to trial. 90 to 95 percent of court cases are resolved with a plea deal—not great for due process, but that’s the way it is. It’s highly unlikely that a conservative DA would have done anything different than Gascon. If you shoot for life without parole, the suspects have no reason to cooperate. California, despite the efforts of its worst DAs, currently doesn’t administer the death penalty.
That aside, by literally every metric, life sentences are insane, and we’re the only democracy that defines justice as old men soiling themselves in jail cells at huge cost to taxpayers half a century after their crimes.
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