A local prosecutor who put a child torturer on death row is sounding the alarm after Gov. Gavin Newsom wiped out California's death row with a single executive order — commuting hundreds of sentences without consulting a single victim's family, erasing juries, judges, and two statewide referendum votes in one stroke.
This is what tyranny looks like in a suit. Californians voted to keep the death penalty in 2012 and again in 2016. Juries weighed evidence over months. Judges imposed sentence after reviewing every motion. One governor decided none of that mattered.
Assistant Head Deputy District Attorney Jon Hatami, who leads the Complex Child Abuse Section of the L.A. County DA's Office, prosecuted the case of Gabriel Fernandez — an 8-year-old Palmdale boy tortured for over 240 days before his mother, Pearl Fernandez, and her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, murdered him in 2013. Pearl Fernandez pleaded guilty and got life. A jury convicted Aguirre of first-degree murder with the special-circumstance torture-murder allegation found true in November 2017, and unanimously decided death was the just punishment.
"In one day, after not talking to a single family member of Gabriel, the governor unilaterally commuted this murderers' sentence," Hatami said in a prepared statement reported by the Santa Clarita Valley Signal. "This isn't justice. It's not transparent. It's also unfair. It ignores the law, the facts, the evidence, the juries' sacrifice and our entire judicial process. Politics has no place when deciding what is right and just."
Hatami added: "It ignores everything that Gabriel went through. Newsom doesn't believe Gabriel's life mattered. Well, I do, his family does and I know the community does. Gabriel will never be forgotten."
The Signal covered Hatami's statement in full. The New York Post, meanwhile, was busy with a different California courtroom story — an $8 million verdict for a family whose autistic child was called a "public nuisance" by a neighbor. Both stories involve a California legal system under strain. But only one outlet told you about a governor single-handedly overriding the entire criminal justice process for hundreds of cases at once.
That omission matters. Hatami noted that Californians voted in favor of capital punishment twice — in 2012 and 2016 — and that the majority of Californians believe it is the just punishment for the worst crimes. The governor's office has not publicly responded to Hatami's statement.
This is the same bipartisan failure Dissenter flagged yesterday: executives of both parties have expanded clemency and commutation power for decades with no accountability mechanism, no requirement to hear from victims, and no check from legislatures that have every incentive to look the other way. When one man can void 700 jury verdicts between breakfast and lunch, the question isn't whether you support the death penalty. The question is who controls the law — the people, or the man in the mansion.
