DAAC condemns District Attorney Hochman’s decision to bring back the death penalty to Los Angeles County.
This is another example of D.A. Hochman returning Los Angeles County to cruel, ineffective, and error-prone policies of the past.
The issues that have driven L.A. voters to repeatedly reject the death penalty still ring true: the incompetent attorneys often defending death penalty cases in L.A. County, its legacy of discriminatory and arbitrary use, its proven failure to deter capital crimes, its tragic fallibility, and its endorsement of brutality and murder as solutions to complex problems.
We hope DA Hochman steps forward for justice by identifying, confronting, and responding to the true causes of crime, rather than continuing to resurrect failed and cruel policy relics L.A. has already left behind.
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Want to learn more about why we rejected the death penalty in LA? Here is a link to an ACLU death penalty report that focused on the LADA office’s DP practices under DA Lacey: https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/061819-dp-whitepaper.pdf.