Los Angeles County District Attorney (D.A.) George Gascón issued an amended directive Friday allowing the use of sentencing enhancements for certain charges, such as hate crimes and sex trafficking, less than two weeks after directing staff to no longer seek such enhancements in any case.
On Friday, Gascón issued an amendment to Special Directive 20-08, which now allows sentencing enhancements for “cases involving the most vulnerable victims and in specified extraordinary circumstances.”
“Over the past few days, I met with and heard from many of you, and while most have welcomed the reforms I have implemented, some have shared their concerns,” Gascón said in a statement issued Friday. “Nearly all of the concerns I have heard center around my policy of ending all enhancements. To be responsive to your input I have decided to make some adjustments to my initial directives.”
The exceptions listed in the amendment, titled Special Directive 20-08.2, are as follows:
- Hate Crimes
- Elder and Dependent Adult Abuse
- Child Physical Abuse
- Child and Adult Sexual Abuse
- Human Sex Trafficking
- Financial Crime
Additionally, enhanced sentences can also be sought in cases involving the following “extraordinary” circumstances:
- “Where the physical injury personally inflicted upon the victim is extensive”
- “Where the type of weapon or manner in which a deadly or dangerous weapon including firearms is used exhibited an extreme and immediate threat to human life”
“I recognize there are some victims that want this office to seek the maximum sentence permissible in their case, but punishment must be in the community’s best interest, proportional, and it must serve a rehabilitative or restorative purpose,” Gascón said in Friday’s statement.
See Related: Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón Releases Flurry Of Reforms
The amendment comes less than two weeks after Gascón released a flurry of nine special directives to his deputy D.A.’s. This included Special Directive 20-08, directed his deputy D.A.s to no longer seek to apply sentence enhancements, which lengthen a prison sentence when certain additional requirements are met.
“Sentencing enhancements are a legacy of California’s “tough on crime” era,” Gascón wrote in the initial directive. “It shall be the policy of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office that the current statutory ranges for criminal offenses alone, without enhancements, are sufficient to both hold people accountable and also to protect public safety.”
Gascón cited a University of Michigan study as part of his reasoning for the policy change, which found that while incarceration does initially prevent crime through incapacitation, “each additional sentence year causes a 4 to 7 percent increase in recidivism that eventually outweighs the incapacitation benefit.”
These directives were met with significant pushback from some of his own prosecutors, with Orange County D.A. Todd Spitzer going as far as to say that the newly-elected D.A. for Los Angeles County had gone “so far off the reservation” in an interview on “America’s Newsroom.”
In response to the pushback, Gascón announced that he would establish the office’s first “Crime Victims Advisory Board,” which would advise him on “best practices for helping victims of crime become survivors.”
“Supporting victims in their journey to becoming survivors is fundamental to community safety. When a person has been harmed, wronged or experienced loss at the hands of another, they need justice and healing,” Gascón said in a statement Thursday. “The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office will pursue a system of parallel justice, where we not only seek legal prosecution for the offenders but also provide support services for victims in their evolution to becoming survivors.”
Gascón issued the amendment to Special Directive 20-08 the next day, after “listening to the community, victims, and my deputy district attorneys.”
The full text of Special Directive 20-08.2 can be read here.
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