Race for District Attorney pits incumbent Gascón against independent Hochman

(Crystal Tompkins/Assistant Design director)

By Gabrielle Gillette
Nov. 3, 2024 11:33 p.m.
This post was updated Nov. 4 at 1:42 a.m.
Los Angeles County voters will vote for their next District Attorney this November, putting the future of LA criminal justice in voters’ hands.
The incumbent, George Gascón is being challenged by Nathan Hochman, an independent who previously ran for California Attorney General as a Republican in 2022. According to a poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the LA Times from late September, Gascón is behind Hochman by 30 percentage points.
Gascón was elected DA in 2020, following an eight-year tenure as DA of San Francisco, and has since focused on criminal justice reform, environmental justice and labor justice. He said he has worked throughout his tenure to avoid using the death penalty, reduce the incarceration rates for young people of color and address police accountability while balancing public safety.
Hochman is a former federal prosecutor and United States Assistant Attorney General as well as former president of the LA Ethics Commission. Running on a platform of removing politics from prosecutorial decisions, Hochman said that if elected, he will be ready to prevent crime, protect public safety and “ensure justice is served to all LA County residents.”

Gascón’s 2024 bid has fallen short of his momentum-filled 2020 campaign which was supported by Vice President Kamala Harris, among other prominent state and national Democrats.
When Gascón entered office, he instituted sweeping policy changes including ending cash bail, banning prosecutors from using the death penalty and showing leniency to low-level offenders. Still, Gascón has since faced two recall efforts, one in 2021 and the other in 2022, though neither garnered enough signatures to qualify.
“There have been two recalls against me, and we never stop running,” he said. “I feel good about the election cycle right now. I understand there are polls out there that … have me weighed down, but we came in from behind in 2020.”
Hochman, meanwhile, is running on a platform of restoring trust and integrity in the DA’s office. An assistant U.S. attorney in California’s Central District in the 1990s, Hochman went on to serve as head of the Justice Department’s tax division under President George W. Bush. Hochman also ran against Rob Bonta as a Republican for state attorney general in 2022 but lost by nearly 2 million votes.
In June, Gascón referred charges against Edan On – a counter-protester involved in the April 30 attack on the Palestine solidarity encampment at UCLA – to the LA city attorney for misdemeanor filing, a step down from his original charges for a felony assault with a deadly weapon.
[Related: Charge against 1st arrest related to attacks on encampment changed to misdemeanor]
This move falls in line with Gascón’s aim to take age into account in sentencing offenders and his broader pledge to resentencing and rehabilitation.
“He was very young. I think he was 18 at the time of the attacks, he had no prior criminal history,” Gascón said. “We tried to separate out personal feelings from this and look at: what was the behavior, who is the individual and what’s the right outcome for him.”
Gascón recently came under national attention when he requested resentencing Erik and Lyle Menendez, who are serving a life sentence in prison without parole after murdering their parents in their Beverly Hills home in 1989. On Wednesday, Gascón announced that he supports the Menendez brothers’ bid for clemency from Governor Gavin Newsom after their advocates claimed the killing was retaliation for alleged abuse.
Moreover, Gascón said though this case is one with a spotlight on it, he has been working to resentence over 300 people who he saw as successfully rehabilitated and deserving of being reestablished in the community. He added that out of the over 300 cases he has resentenced over his LA career, less than one percent have recidivated.
“I understand the Menendez (brothers) are very famous,” Gascón said. “But what often people don’t realize is that we have been resentencing a lot of Black and brown people that went into the system very early on and have been in prison for decades, and they have rehabilitated themselves and they really belong back out in the community with their families.”
Despite this, Gascón said some of his staff do not support his decision to resentence the Menendez brothers, saying they are uncertain that the brothers have substantial evidence that their cases are deserving of reevaluation.
Hochman said he also believes in an all-encompassing evaluation of each individual defendant. Citing his 34 years in criminal justice experience, Hochman said he believes in a “hard middle” accountability system – looking into the crime committed and the impact of the crime for each defendant to determine if being behind bars is a necessary outcome.
“It’s a rejection of extremes,” Hochman said. “Pro-criminal extreme policies that say that certain crimes and certain criminals will not be prosecuted even if the facts and the law justify the prosecution – I reject that extreme. I reject the extreme of mass incarceration.”
An August poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and The LA Times found that 60% of surveyed likely voters said they felt public safety has declined in LA County over the past three years, with only 5% saying they felt it has improved.
According to data from the LA County Sheriff’s department, the department investigated 281 homicides in 2021, a rise from the 201 investigations in 2020. The number has since fallen to 212 in 2023.
However, Aaron Littman, an assistant professor at the UCLA School of Law, said he believes an approach like Gascón’s tends to be more effective in terms of public safety and public health.
He added that incarcerating large numbers of people – which Hochman hopes to avoid – for long periods of time has detrimental effects on them and their communities, as well as an increased burden on taxpayers. High incarceration rates do not prove to be useful in reducing risks to the public, Littman said.
Aside from crime rates, Hochman said that Gascón acts too much under a political agenda, alleging that he makes decisions based on political ideology instead of facts. Hochman said he will make decisions based on facts and laws instead of political affiliation if he were to be DA.
“He (Gascón) enacted these policies that aren’t based on the facts of the law, they’re based on his political agenda,” Hochman said. “My goal is to remove politics from the DA’s office, go back to just evaluating cases on the facts and the law and nothing else.”
Gascón said he believes Hochman’s accusations are hypocritical, arguing that his proposed policies to utilize the death penalty and to prosecute defendants “to the fullest extent of the law,” are also politically motivated.
“He’s appealing to a base,” Gascón said. “Unfortunately, the polarization of our country is such that policy decisions are always looked through a political lens – you’re either on the right or the left or if you’re in the middle you’re sometimes squeezed and you’re not sure which way is up and down.”
Littman said achieving a middle ground as DA is not just a one-dimensional spectrum, adding that there are a great deal of complicated policy choices that go into each stance. Gascón and Hochman are not on completely opposite sides of every issue, he said.
“There are all sorts of complicated policy choices,” Littman said. “George Gascón doesn’t prosecute nobody, … and Hochman doesn’t think we should prosecute everybody who commits a crime.”
The two candidates both have a swath of endorsements from across a spectrum of industries.
Among Gascón’s supporters are LA County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, The LA Times, Jane Fonda and labor unions such as the LA County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.
Hochman has support from law enforcement agencies such as the LA County Police Chiefs’ Association, Jackie Lacey – the former LA district attorney who Gascón beat in the 2020 election – and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso.
Littman said the outcome of the DA race will determine which crimes in LA County will be prosecuted and which will be viewed with less priority, determining the future of the county’s criminal justice system for the next four years.
“The DA is the one who gets to make all those decisions about what gets prioritized and what gets deprioritized, and that’s a lot of power,” he said. “That’s a pretty important position.”