A federal judge said Tuesday that he would allow prosecutors to restrain the charges against LA County Sheriff’s deputies.
In publishing his decision Tuesday, US District Judge Stephen V. Wilson thwarted the very unusual legal manipulation driven last month by Los Angeles’ newly appointed US lawyer Bill Essay. Trump-appointed prosecutors moved to offer a Trevor Kirk Associate Deputy plea deal two months after being convicted of a felony for pepper spraying and attacking an unarmed woman while responding to a robbery at a Lancaster supermarket in 2023.
The essay’s decision to provide Kirk fulfilled a rare post-identification plea deal this month in several federal prosecutors resigning from their posts.
Wilson refused to do any controversial manipulation from the essaylily where Kirk was sentenced to probation, but he granted the prosecution’s allegation to alleviate charges of misdemeanors against his adjutant despite the conviction of the jury. Kirk could still face prison and prison time when he was sentenced June 2nd.
A spokesman for the US Lawyer’s Office declined to comment.
“We are grateful that this allegation will be granted and will prepare us for a compelling argument without probation, prison time or probation,” said Kirk’s defense attorney Tom Yu.
If Kirk was found guilty of a felony, he would not have been able to continue his law enforcement career or own a gun.
Kirk was convicted in February on one count of disenfranchised rights under the colour of the law, planting a knee on his neck during the 2023 incident, raiding victim Jacee Houston, throwing her to the ground, and threw her on the ground, and being caught on the victim’s camera.
Kirk was originally faced in prison for up to 10 years, but was defeated after the Trump administration appointed an essay, a former member of the California Congress as a US lawyer in Los Angeles. The essay approved a rare post-trial judicial agreement with Kirk.
The essays are solid Trump allies and solid conservatives appointed when the president called for weakening the independence of the US Department of Justice. The post-trial judicial agreement landed the same week that it issued an executive order vowing to “unleash” American law enforcement agencies.
Under the contract approved by Essayli, Kirk would have served in prison for up to one year. The crime became a felony as the government agreed to recommend a year of probation and moved to attack the ju apprentice’s finding that Kirk had injured the victim.
Wilson found the plea bargain unnecessary due to the ju-game verdict and said the probation sentence “did not match the facts of this case.”
“The defendant committed the intentional use of crime – an irrational force while acting as a police officer under the colour of the law,” Wilson wrote. “Cops are entrusted with protecting the masses without harming them.”
Houston’s lawyer Carrie Harper called the rule “a heartbreaking” and “a tragedy of justice.”
“There’s no more completeness,” she said. “They put blood, sweat and tears in this case because prosecutors opposed their lawyers… They were convicted of a felony.”
She also said of Kirk:
The agreement caused confusion in the US Attorney General’s Office, with US Attis assistants. Eli A. Alcaraz, Brian R. Faerstein, Michael J. Morse, Cassie Palmer, chiefs of the public corruption and civil rights sector all withdraw from the incident. Rob Keenan, the only US lawyer to sign the judicial agreement, was not previously involved in the case.
Alcaraz, Faerstein, and Palmer filed their resignations after the offer of a judicial agreement. The application filed in this month’s case also confirmed that Palmer has left the U.S. Prosecutor’s Office.
The ruling appeared to be increasingly bewildered by the government’s logic of offering Kirk a deal after Wilson burned Keenan last week. He questioned whether the prosecutor had “serious and serious doubts” about the lieutenant’s guilt, and tried to justify the contract to Keenan.
Keenan argued that the agreement was “a pure exercise of the prosecutor’s discretion.”
In June 2023, Kirk was responding to a robbery reportedly threw Houston on the ground and scattered her in his face while filming him outside Lancaster Winco. Houston agreed with the female suspect’s contributor’s account, but when Kirk first faced her, she was not armed or committed a crime, court records show.
“He kept telling me to stop resisting if I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t breathe. I thought he was trying to kill me,” Houston told court last week. She piloted a white Minneapolis police officer used in 2020 with Kirk on her neck, killing George Floyd.
In court, Keenan described Kirk’s use of force as excessive, but at one point she attacked the victim’s credibility and described it as “barely,” suggesting that she exaggerated the injury in a victim’s impact statement she made in court.
Wilson did not accept the analysis.
“The ju-degree was completely justified by discovering that he was using excessive force in bringing her to the ground and spraying her,” the judge said. “If he ordered her to handcuff… that would be another case.”
In the Times’ recommendation of the sentencing, Sheriff Robert Luna asked Wilson to sentence Kirk to probation, denounced his actions that day with poor training, resulting from the fact that the Sheriff’s Office had not properly followed the reforms ordered by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
Source link
