George Gascón Loses Los Angeles District Attorney Race
George Gascón, a champion of criminal justice reform whose ascension four years ago as the top prosecutor in Los Angeles County signaled a pivotal victory in the movement to elect progressive district attorneys, has lost his reelection bid.
Among the possible moves Nathan Hochman can make in the following weeks: Withdrawing a recommendation from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office to resentence Erik and Lyle Menendez. Hochman, who hasn’t taken a position on the case, has said he’ll review the decision if he wins the race once he gets access to confidential records and filings.
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Ryan Murphy’s polarizing nine-part series following the 1989 killings of José and Kitty Menendez, a documentary and an army of TikTok supporters spurred renewed scrutiny into the trials.
Last month, Gascón announced that he’d move for reconsideration of the decades-old case involving the brothers, who killed their parents in a salvo of shotgun blasts in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion. They’ve served 34 years in prison, exhausting all of their appeals in 2005.
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has set a Dec. 11 hearing on the recommendation for the brothers to be resentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. If granted, the proposal will go to a parole board, which will determine whether they should be set free. They could immediately be eligible for release.
Asked whether a new district attorney could undue his recommendation at a press conference, Gascón voiced skepticism. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Once it’s filed, it’s filed. It’s up to the court to take it from there.”
Under Gascón, the district attorney’s office also sent letters to Gov. Gavin Newsom in support of clemency — a move the brothers’ attorney told TMZ could see them released by Thanksgiving by entirely eliminating the resentencing process. On a podcast, Newsom indicated that he was told by Murphy’s producing team before the series debuted that it would trigger renewed scrutiny in the case.
“I met with the team that put the series together about nine months ago, and they gave me a heads-up,” Newsom said. “They said, ‘Watch and see what happens after this series is released, because it’s going to generate a lot more conversation around whether these guys should be released or resentenced.’ And here we are, fast-tracked not so many months later.”
The show was inspired by a TikTok movement that saw users pointing to new evidence suggesting that José Menendez had also molested a member of the 1980s boy band Menudo. This was featured in the Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed Peacock docuseries by Robert Rand, a journalist who also unearthed a letter written by Erik Menendez to his cousin Andy Cano corroborating accusations that he was sexually abused.
With Gascón out of office, Los Angeles County will see more punitive measures to deter crime. Hochman has criticized his predecessor’s policies not to prosecute juveniles for misdemeanors or pursue gang enhancements, which are additional prison sentences added on top of underlying felonies that involve gangs.
In the months leading up to the election, a narrative took shape that Gascón’s time as district attorney facilitated an increase in crime across the region. On the campaign trail, he stressed that neighboring areas with traditional prosecutors, like Orange and Sacramento counties, saw larger surges in violent crime, which is trending down in L.A. this year.
Gascón, the former district attorney and police chief in San Francisco who also had a stint as an assistant chief in the Los Angeles Police Department, faced long odds in the race. Two days before the election, he trailed Hochman by 25 points.
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