Another day, another outrage from the District Attorney’s office in Los Angeles. The backstory of this one goes back several years to November 2018. That’s when firefighters were called to a burning apartment building in LA. They put out the fire and found there were two dead women inside, both had been shot.

Firefighters discovered the bodies of 16-year-old Sierra Brown and her older sister, Uniek Atkins, in a burned-out Westchester apartment. Brown had been beaten and shot once at close range, while Atkins died from multiple gunshots, according to court filings. Police arrested Brown’s 17-year-old boyfriend, alleging he had doused the apartment in bleach and torched it to cover his tracks.

Sierra Brown’s boyfriend was 17 years and 11 months old at the time of the crime. After murdering the two women, both of whom were mothers to young children, he took their phones and fled in their car. He returned to the scene a bit later and pretended to be shocked by what had happened. He was interviewed by police at the scene and tried to put them on a false trail. (I’ve looked at several stories from the time of the arson but I can’t find one that explains where the three young children were at the time the killer set fire to the apartment. The youngest was only 10 months so these kids weren’t in school. Were they in the apartment when he set the fire and fled? Maybe it was reported somewhere but I can’t find it.)

DA Jackie Lacey was planning to try the shooter/arsonist as an adult which meant he would be facing decades, possibly even life, in prison. But then George Gascon was elected. On his first day in office Gascon announced a slew of changes for how he would operate the DA’s office, including a firm rule that he would not move any juveniles to adult court. That meant the killer of Sierra Brown and Uniek Atkins would be treated as a juvenile offender. Instead of facing life, he would be facing around 7 years in a juvenile facility for a double murder.

Needless to say, the parents of the two sisters were outraged. They had a call with Gascon in December 2020:

Their mother Felicia Andrew is demanding justice for her daughters…

…she had a meeting with Gascón in 2020, where he told her he’d “look over the case and not use his blanket policy.”

“He was very cold-hearted, he didn’t seem like, you know, he cared … at the end of the call he said, ‘I’ve been a police officer, LAPD for so many years and I’ve seen a lot of murders,” Andrew said.

But after that call something happened that caused Gascon to reevaluate that policy. There was another case where a man named James Tubbs had gone into a woman’s bathroom and sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl. Tubbs was just a few days shy of his 18th birthday at the time of the assault. When he was arrested years later, Tubbs announced that he was a trans woman and would henceforth be called Hannah Tubbs. In keeping with his policy, Gascon charged Hannah Tubbs as a juvenile and even sent the adult Tubbs to a juvenile facility when he was convicted.

And then Fox News got hold of some embarrassing jailhouse recordings in which Tubbs suggested his trans announcement was a ploy to avoid men’s prison. He mocked his young victim and bragged about the light sentence he was going to get. Suddenly, DA Gascon reversed course and announced that in some cases he would consider charging minors as adults.

The very first case which was reconsidered under his revised policy was the murder of Sierra Brown and Uniek Atkins. This week, prosecutors working for Gascon attempted to bring the case to adult court but a judge rejected those efforts.

Late last month, L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. Courtney Dyer argued that the teen’s criminal conduct in the killings showed “sophistication,” noting he may have used a pillow as a silencer during the assault and set a fire to try to hide evidence…

But defense attorney Janet Roh countered that the teen had shown marked improvement in custody, noting he was reading at a fourth-grade level at the time of his arrest and had been smoking marijuana on a daily basis from the age of 12. In custody, she said, the teen had responded well to services and education.

“Life in juvenile hall has been a drastically improved experience,” Roh said, pointing to physical abuse the teen suffered at the hands of his father at a young age.

An Assembly bill passed in 2022 made it much tougher to transfer juveniles to adult court. The bill requires prosecutors to prove “by clear and convincing evidence” that the juvenile would not be amenable to rehabilitation in juvenile custody.

Gascón filed a letter in support of the bill last year, which was written by Assemblywoman Mia Bonta (D-Alameda), the wife of California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta…

Chiding prosecutors that their repeated allusions to the “gruesome” nature of the crime were not enough to meet the standards of the law, [Judge] Smith said prosecutors failed to “put forth any evidence” of what the teen’s rehabilitative needs were. Smith also noted that the teen had “cognitive abnormalities” in his frontal lobe and an IQ low enough to raise questions about his “intellectual function” when he was first taken into custody.

So, under public pressure, Gascon made a failed effort to treat this killer as an adult. But thanks to a glowing report from his defense attorney and a bill passed last year with Gascon’s support the judge found his office didn’t come close to making his case. He executed two young mothers with young children and set their apartment on fire with no regard to the other people living there, but he’s had a tough life so let’s not be too harsh. That’s the justice system LA has now. It’s the justice system Gascon wanted.

You almost have to wonder if Gascon really wanted to succeed here. Maybe he just wanted the public insulation of having tried.

Finally, there was another story this week which serves as a kind of coda to this story and a reminder of where LA stands with this DA. According to Fox News, Gascon just suspended one of his deputy DAs for “deadnaming” Hannah Tubbs, the convicted child molester who is now awaiting trial for murder.

Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon has suspended the attorney who prosecuted a 26-year-old trans child molester who was accused of identifying as a woman only after DNA evidence linked her to a cold case crime, according to law enforcement sources.

Shea Sanna, who had been the lead prosecutor for part of the case, is accused of misgendering and “deadnaming” the convicted child molester Hannah Tubbs, who is now accused of beating a man to death in the woods with a rock in Kern County.

Sanna has argued in the past that jailhouse phone calls show Tubbs was attempting to use gender identity to game the justice system – an argument that sources say made others in Gascon’s office uncomfortable and led to the suspension.

You do start to get the impression that the actual victims in these cases aren’t nearly as important to George Gascon as his social justice priorities.