LOS ANGELES (KNX) — Responding to significant public backlash, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón said Friday that a sentence handed down for a woman ordered to serve two years in a juvenile facility for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in a restaurant bathroom “may not” have been sufficient.
The sentence arose from a policy implemented by Gascón, eliminating the option of trying juveniles as adults for serious crimes. The 26-year-old defendant, Hannah Tubbs, was 17 when she attacked a child in the restroom of a Palmdale restaurant in 2014. As a result, Tubbs’ case was handled in juvenile court.
L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger called the resolution of Tubbs’ case “unsatisfactory.” In a statement last month, she lamented that the judge’s hande were “tied” due to “the fact that the D.A.’s office failed to file a motion to transfer Tubbs to adult criminal court, which is where she rightly belongs.”
In a statement Sunday, Gascón said he became aware after Tubbs’ sentencing of “extremely troubling statements she made about her case, the resolution of it, and the young girl that she harmed.”
“While for most people, several years of jail time is adequate, it may not be for Ms. Tubbs,” Gascón said.
He noted that Tubbs was arrested many years after the commission of the crime, “rather than the usual case, where a child is arrested close in time to their crime.” He added that Tubbs had “several charges in other counties after the juvenile offense but never received any services, which both her past behavior and that her subsequent arrest demonstrates she clearly needs.”
"If we knew about her disregard for the harm she caused, we would have handled this case differently. The complex issues and facts of her particular case were unusual and I should have treated them that way. This change in policy will allow us the space to do that moving forward," Gascón said.
In Sunday’s statement, Gascón said his office had “implemented policies to create a different pathway for outlier cases while simultaneously creating protections to prevent these exceptions from becoming the rule.”
The D.A. is facing a renewed recall effort launched in December. Recall organizers were working to collect 566,857 signatures from registered L.A. County voters by a July 6 deadline.
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