Written by Natalia Perez
San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan has officially launched her re-election campaign for 2022. Before her election as District Attorney, she served as a Deputy District Attorney here in San Diego for 28 years where she tried over 100 jury trials. She has spent the last 4 years hard at work creating a safer San Diego, launched campaigns to reduce sexual assault on college campuses, reduce San Diego’s opioid overdoses, and bringing awareness to human trafficking.
Compare her to someone like San Francisco’s District Attorney Chesa Boudin and you’ll realize just how lucky we are to have her trying criminals. Earlier this year Chesa Boudin came under heavy fire for his practice of parole first jail second when a double fatal hit and run occurred on New Year’s Eve. The suspect, Troy McAlister, was out on parole instead of behind bars due to Boudin’s lack of action and not file and of the criminal charges McAlister had racked up after his April 2020 release from jail. Instead, Boudin chose to blame the parole officer and the Daly City Police for not following proper procedures.
This is not the kind of work we should expect from a District Attorney, and it hasn’t been the kind we’ve seen since Summer Stephan took office. We have seen the prosecution of hate crimes tripled, and San Diego’s rape kit backlog cleared. Summer Stephan has created multiple opportunities for would-be prisoners to transform their lives and has created programs based on helping those with mental illness.
If you look just north to Los Angeles County, you see another possibility of what San Diego could become after 2022. George Gascon has completely upturned the criminal justice system and abandoned all sense of law in Los Angeles in the name of social justice and racial justice. Within his first months of being District Attorney, he has given a murder and arsonist the chance to be let out of prison for a double homicide within five years. After two teenage girls were shot and killed in a burned-out apartment by a now twenty-year-old, Gascon has decided to try the man as a juvenile due to him being a month away from turning 18 at the time of the crime.
This insane rhetoric that Gascon is spreading could easily come to San Diego if Summer Stephan is not re-elected as District Attorney.
Photo via KUSI
