Justice System Strain and the Push for Change

Congratulations to our guest, Nathan Hochman, who beat George Gascon to win the race for Los Angeles County D.A.

Is the justice system failing its most critical asset—its people? Join us as we unravel the turmoil within George Gascon's District Attorney's office, where over 200 staff members, including seasoned trial lawyer John McKinney, have exited due to morale-crushing policies. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Challenges in District Attorney's Office
• 4:11 Concerns Over Unfiled Cases and Crime
• 8:32 Legal Community Support in Campaign

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

other prosecuting agencies because they just did not want to work in the environment that we had. I was lucky to be somewhat insulated from a lot of these policies because I don't handle any of those criminal cases, so I wasn't having to do all of that. But I saw it. I saw it all around me. I saw people like John McKinney, who is an excellent, excellent trial lawyer, who was in our major trials section, whose office was literally just down the hall from mine. I would see him every day get retaliated against and get transferred and allegedly it was a promotion because he was moving into a DIC position position.

Speaker 1: 0:46

But I think if you ask most people in our office if they could be a DIC or one of the trial lawyers in the major crime section, most of us would want to be in major crimes and so I've seen that and I've seen the effect that it has on the morale of people. And you were talking about when you were running. You had a lot of opponents. I knew a lot of your opponents. There were a lot of people from my office who got involved in that race Jonathan and Tommy. Literally almost the entire field was DAs or former DAs.

Speaker 2: 1:16

No, it's very true. And again, when I have had the chance not just to get the endorsement from the union representing all the deputy district attorneys, but to try and meet with as many of them as possible I'm over 300 at this point through meetings throughout this county and you folks I mean you get my applause and my appreciation because you're on the front lines of a battle and the battle isn't against the criminals, shockingly it's against your own boss in the front office. They've done their absolute best to put the handcuffs on you folks, to make it much more difficult for you to do your job than they have to actually get you the resources, training and everything else to do your job better. My philosophy is very simple. It's a philosophy that every business leader analyzes the business and in this business's case, you're the DA's office.

Speaker 2: 2:07

What's the greatest asset? Is it the cases, the courtrooms, the computers? Is it the toner? Of course not. It's the 750 deputy district attorneys. It's the 200 plus investigators in the Bureau of Investigation, it's the hundreds of support staff that are part of the DA's office. That's your greatest resource. So my job as DA is to maximize that resource. Gascon just doesn't get that. I don't know if he's scared of you folks, intimidated because he's never been in a courtroom himself, but he actually has put in deputy public defenders to help run the office. I mean, these are people who've never been prosecutors. They've been representing the criminals their whole career and now they're switching sides without any experience and he is forsaking all the decades of experience that he could be using to the office's advantage. So it's not a shock that over 200 people have left the DA's office and haven't been able to have been replaced. Your numbers are down hundreds.

Speaker 1: 3:14

And, believe me, I've experienced that because I've had people pulled from my unit to go temporarily to handle something in juvenile or another court because they did not have enough prosecutors to cover the basic courts that we have. I'm what they consider a specialized unit, because we're not doing that and we have a few of those and they do very important things. We have a consumer protection division, we have an environmental crimes division division. We have an environmental crimes division and we have a lot of specialty like code enforcement, things like that. But these are things that are very highly specialized and technical and you can't just throw people in there, but they're pulling people out of those and not letting them be able to do their jobs because they're not able to adequately staff the basic core courts that are our responsibility.

Speaker 2: 4:11

Yeah, and one additional statistic that is not lost on me is that they estimate there's over 10,000 unfiled cases there. I mean in the past, if you had a couple hundred unfiled cases, it was cause for concern. Now that number is over 10,000 unfiled cases, and what that translates to is think about how many victims have now suffered where the police that investigated the case handed it over to the DA's office to make a decision and literally the DA's office is sitting on over 10,000 cases sitting on it and I see that directly in my job at Asset Forfeiture because our section is basically broken down into two sections under $40,000 or over $40,000.

Speaker 1: 4:56

If it's under $40,000, we have to have a criminal filing of of a predicate offense. So it has to be a narcotics trafficking type of case before we can do a forfeiture and we have to file that in the criminal court where that case is pending. I have been forced to reject multiple thousands of dollars of cases, some $35,000. I've had to reject those because there was not a filing within the one-year statute of limitations that I have to bring the forfeiture action. So we're leaving money on the table.

Speaker 2: 5:33

Right, and this is when you say money, we're talking illegal proceeds. I mean, this isn't just money. Money, this is money that was part of a crime.

Speaker 1: 5:42

This is the illegal proceeds of narcotics trafficking. These are individuals and we're not one of those agencies like we have in some parts of the country where you're taking things from mom and pop just because they're driving through All of ours. We have to have the proof of the narcotics trafficking and we're very strict in relationship to that. So we're not being able to punish some of these narcotics dealers by taking their proceeds. So not only they don't get filed on, they get their $35,000 back and you know who's paying attention to this?

Speaker 2: 6:18

The criminals. The criminals I mean, I represent again. I've been a defense lawyer. They call it the gas gone deal. That's like if someone gets arrested and you give them a deal like, well, you're going to have to go to jail for a few years, you committed a pretty serious crime. They said no, no, no, I want the gas gone deal. They literally call it that. That's the deal. That's a get out of jail free card deal. You know, it's funny.

Speaker 2: 6:42

They um in seal beach. Interestingly, the seal beach police department started an Instagram uh campaign and it says don't steal in seal. And what it is is body camera footage of them arresting people stealing in seal beach. And the people who were stealing there say okay, cite and release me, let me go. And they're going you're in Orange County. These people thought that Seal Beach was still in LA County. Oh, wow. And they go you're in Orange County, we're taking you to jail right now. And they're going wait, I mean, I'm not in LA. Well, in LA I can just give me a ticket, a speeding ticket. No, no, no, because you're in Orange County.

Speaker 2: 7:19

Say, well, here, here's the stuff back, whatever I can do, just get me back to LA County. That is what we have to stop. That is what Gascon has created, that the criminals are paying attention and they know if you go into a 7-Eleven. I had a 7-Eleven franchisee owner tell me the following Guy came into his store, he took about $10 of merchandise. He started to walk up, walk out and he flipped the guy a $5 bill and the store owner said well, that stuff costs $10. He says you should be lucky, I'm giving you $5. That is now the mentality that people have that they can basically come in, steal stuff and there's no punishment for it. The DA's office will not prosecute.

Speaker 1: 8:00

And you've gotten your family involved somewhat in the campaign, don't you?

Speaker 2: 8:04

Yeah, no, my, my sister, my sisters and my brother have been enormously helpful. My brother's almost my de facto campaign manager. My wife is sort of my secret weapon, but my secret secret weapon is my daughter.

Speaker 1: 8:17

I think we got a photo of your, your wife, and there she with your dogs.

Speaker 2: 8:22

My dogs obviously are my triple secret weapon. Yeah, there's my wife, vivian. We have been married now over 31 years. She's a native Californian from Camarillo, originally a lawyer. She was a lawyer in one of the big firms as a civil litigator and then she actually was in charge of reality TV for one of the big TV studios a civil litigator and then she actually was in charge of reality TV for one of the big TV studios. She had a pretty cool job. There's my daughter. I've done discussions with my daughter. She's up north in college and those things started when she sort of asked me some basic questions about my campaign and I gave her the answer and she said you know what, why don't we actually record that and put that on social media? Because people my age, those are their questions. And I said you know what? Pretty great idea. And so we've done a whole bunch of discussions with my daughter and you know, and then I've been fortunate enough to be endorsed by a whole lot of different people.

Speaker 1: 9:20

I was going to say. You have one of the most impressive endorsement lists for legal-related things that I've seen in quite a while. You're basically endorsed by almost all of the former US attorneys here in Los Angeles. I recognize a number of them there's Robert Bonner and Debra Yang. So how did you pull this off?

Speaker 2: 9:48

The advantage of being 60 and running for office at this point in my life is that I've spent the last 35 years working in the community the legal community, the charitable community, the civic community, building those relationships. You know, if you put the work in and people see what type of work you do, the results that you can generate. When it comes time to run for something, they're willing to support you, and I've been fortunate enough to get support from some incredible people.

Speaker 1: 10:21

And you have the support of a couple of my former bosses. Yes, steve Cooley, who I worked for for a number of years.

Speaker 2: 10:28

Steve has been on board since the beginning Three-term LADA. Things were really running well when he was the DA. In fact, a lot of the problems we're having today are because of policies that have basically contradicted what Steve was doing for those 12 years. They tried this again, this gas-gone social experiment, and it's failed you.