It’s not very often that a columnist for the LA Times says that people on the right are correct about something but it happened today. Anita Chabria says that the Hannah Tubbs case has become “fodder” for the “conservative outrage machine” but admits that in this case they have a point. In fact, as she explains at length, there’s really no way to justify the outcome of this case regardless of your perspective on the wisdom of criminal justice reform.

I’ve written about the attack before but basically Tubbs entered the women’s restroom at a Denny’s and assaulted a 10 year old girl then fled the scene and the state for several years. During his stays in Oregon, Washington and Idaho he continued to rack up arrests and charges. Chabria reports that Tubbs “rap sheet was described to me as 37 pages long when printed out.” One of those cases is from 2020 when Tubbs was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon for stabbing someone multiple times over a minor argument.

So it’s not hard to see why Gascon and his office are denying they knew who Tubbs really was when they decided to charge him as a minor. But the ADA who handled the case said if they didn’t know it’s because they didn’t care to look.

Gascón has been claiming that incendiary jailhouse recordings between Tubbs and her father — in which she appears to mock the lightness of her sentence, as Fox News first reported — weren’t shared with his inner circle early enough in the proceedings. Shea Sanna, the deputy D.A. who tried Tubbs, disputes that, strongly…

When Sanna, the L.A. County assistant district attorney, took over the Denny’s case in 2021, all of that background became known to anyone in the D.A.’s office who cared to review the details. But Gascón stuck with his blanket policy that would require Tubbs to be tried in juvenile court, angering Sanna, who became publicly vocal in his criticism of Gascón.

“I have three kids and a mortgage and a wife, but I am not going to do the wrong thing even if my boss tells to me do it,” he told me, adding that he draws a line when it comes to crimes against little kids. “This case is past that line,” he said.

This case was a disaster even without the jailhouse recordings turned up by Fox News. Gascon quickly backtracked the moment his office was contacted for comment on those recordings in an attempt to get ahead of this train wreck.

Gascon has arguably been lucky so far in the sense that the victim in this case, who is now 18, hasn’t been doing interviews to highlight just how awful this crime was. As Chabria points out, the reason the victim hasn’t been more public is because she’s still so traumatized.

She had rarely gone out for meals, but that day, her brother wanted “to do something good for the family.” Since then, she’s never been able to live life the same way, she wrote, constantly fearful, feeling she was somehow responsible for her own victimization. The attack has made her suicidal, and has put her brother in therapy as well because he felt guilty that he didn’t stop it. Most days, she stays inside because she is afraid of men.

Imagine going through something like the bathroom attack as a helpless child and knowing your attacker escaped justice by fleeing the state. And then finally, he’s caught for another violent crime and immediately announces he’s now a woman in an apparent attempt to game the system and avoid harsh consequences.

And then on top of all that, the progressive ideologue DA literally treats your attacker as a child despite 37 pages of evidence that he’s already become a hardened adult criminal. As a result, the long-delayed justice in your case is a two-year sentence in a juvenile facility, a sentence that could result in Tubbs serving just a few months and never having to register as a sex offender. Lastly, when the ADA and others publicly objects to this light treatment of your attacker, the DA’s office lies and claims they had no idea Tubbs was such a bad guy.

“I’m guessing Gascón knows that, and knows he’s responsible for failing to deliver justice on behalf of this teenager,” Chabria writes, despite the fact that Gascon is still trying to evade responsibility by claiming he just didn’t know.

If this is what criminal justice reform looks like then LA residents should consider if they aren’t better off without it. More to the point, the county would be better off without leftist DA George Gascon who didn’t just let this happen but who literally ordered that it happen. Hopefully voters will get a chance to recall him.