The Unraveling of George Gascón

Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón threw a “hail Mary” last week announcing that he will seek the resentencing and release of the Menendez brothers.  Phil Helsel and Antonio Planas of NBC news report that at a press conference last Thursday Gascón told reporters, “I believe that they have paid their debt to society.”  Gascón has stated several times that no criminal should spend more than 20 years behind bars.

The cold-blooded shotgun murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez in 1989 by their two sons Erik and Lyle, who were 21 and 18 years old, was among the most notorious murder cases in Los Angeles history. Erik and Lyle snuck into their parents’ house with shotguns and came up behind them while they were watching television, shooting Jose 8 times and Kitty 10 times.  The brothers initially claimed that they discovered their parents’ bodies and suggested that burglars killed them. They later admitted the killings but claimed self defense due to their father’s alleged sexual abuse. The brothers were tried twice for the murders.  At the second trial a jury sentenced them to life-without-the-possibility-of-parole.

At the first trial, the attorneys for the brothers argued that they had been molested by their father. It ended in a mistrial. At the second trial, the judge refused to allow the allegation of sexual abuse because there was no evidence to support it. As reported by NBC Los Angeles:

Les Zoeller, the Beverly Hills Police Department detective who investigated Jose and Kitty’s murders, also said previously that there was no evidence of rape and sexual molestation.

“It is a big fairy tale,” Zoeller, who died in 2021, told NBC Los Angeles in 2017. “They murdered the best witnesses we had.”

Kitty Menendez’s brother, Milton Anderson, told NBC that the brothers decided to kill their parents when they learned that, because they refused to get jobs, their father threatened to cut them out of their $14 million estate.

The new evidence that sparked the call by celebrities and bleeding hearts was an undated letter to a now-deceased cousin citing the molestation.

Shortly after his election, District Attorney Gascón recruited former defense attorneys to fill supervisory positions, and began a years-long effort to seek court rulings to dramatically reduce the sentences for murderers, sex offenders, and violent gang members.  Dozens of these violent offenders have gained release through Gascón’s effort. This, and his policy of not prosecuting thousands of offenders, has repulsed Los Angeles County residents to the extent that polling has his opponent, law and order former prosecutor Nathan Hochman, with a 30-point lead in next week’s November 5 election.

It seems likely that Gascón’s newly-announced effort to free the Menendez brothers is a political calculation that might garner votes from young people, ignorant of the Menendez brothers’ crimes, and the diminishing population of bleeding hearts still living in Los Angeles.

The opposite is probably true.  Gascón’s obvious inability to “read the room” and his total abandonment of crime victims and the law-abiding public is going to propel him from office, probably to a professorship at U.C. Berkeley or some other liberal academic enclave. The place where rejected progressive district attorneys go to die.