The rogue prosecutor in the Laken Riley case needs to be fired
Deborah Gonzalez was elected as the District Attorney for Athens-Clarke And Oconee Counties in Georgia. Her district encompasses the University of Georgia, where an illegal alien brutally raped and murdered Laken Riley, a nursing student. She is also a hard leftist who is obsessed with race and supports open borders. Those obsessions explain why she did not seek the death penalty in Laken Riley’s case, nor will she do so in other cases—an act of prosecutorial nullification that should lead to her being fired.
When Gonzalez ran for office in 2020, she received enthusiastic support from far-left organizations, such as “Voting While Black,” a branch of Color Of Change PAC, a Soros-funded organization. When Voting While Black endorsed her, it specifically claimed as one of her virtues the fact that she would “End death penalty prosecutions.”
Voting While Black wasn’t making this up. Deborah Gonzalez did indeed make refusing to apply the death penalty one of the central planks of her platform: “If we are to establish reforms that make our community whole, we have to stop pursuing the death penalty in the DA’s office. ... As a DA candidate, I have promised to never seek the death penalty...”
Image: Deborah Gonzalez, Western Judicial Circuit DA Office (public domain).
Once she entered office, Gonzalez turned her campaign promise into official policy. Indeed, she went beyond that, explaining that her policy was intended to protect all illegal aliens:
Athens-Clarke District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, who appointed a special prosecutor to take over the prosecution of Jose Ibarra at the end of February amid criticism over her own prosecutorial record, laid out her soft-on-crime reforms when she assumed office in January 2021.
Gonzalez said her office would “no longer seek the death penalty” and when considering charging defendants, she would “take into account collateral consequences to undocumented defendants,” according to a copy of the district attorney’s policies shared by Georgia state Rep. Houston Gaines (R-Barrow).
Before going any further, it’s worth noting that Gonzalez has openly stated that she intends to violate federal law. Thus, it is a federal offense if a person
knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation... (8 USC sec. 1324(1)(a)(iii).
With the trial of Jose Ibarra, Gonzalez made good on that policy. Ibarra’s conviction was based on truly overwhelming evidence—and he didn’t even bother to fight the case that hard, refusing to go in front of a jury, and instead insisting on a judge trial. The undisputed facts were that he went to the University of Georgia campus to hunt for a rape victim and, when he found Laken Riley, he attacked. She fought for 18 hard minutes as he raped and strangled her before bashing her head in. The judge instantly found him guilty of murder.
Under GA Code § 16-5-1, “A person convicted of the offense of murder shall be punished by death, by imprisonment for life without parole, or by imprisonment for life.” (Emphasis mine.)
However, when it came to imposing sentence on Ibarra, the judge didn’t have before him the choice of executing Ibarra for his heinous crime. Instead, Gonzalez’s charging papers provide only the options of a life sentence with or without parole. The judge chose the “without parole” option.
The problem with Gonzalez’s policy is that it’s an illegal usurpation of legislative power. The people elect legislators to make the laws. The prosecutors exist only to apply those laws to alleged wrongdoers via the mechanism of trials hedged about with the protections of due process. While prosecutors have some discretion to decide how to handle specific cases, they do not have the discretion to nullify laws entirely.
We saw this play out in Florida in 2022, when Andrew Warren, another Soros prosecutor, announced that he would not prosecute entire classes of offenses with which he disagreed. Ron DeSantis responded by firing him. DeSantis did so by using his authority under the Florida Constitution, which imposes on the governor the obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed...” (Fla. Const., Art. IV, sec. 1(a).) Warren fussed about suing after being fired but eventually slunk away.
It may interest Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, to know that under the Georgia Constitution, he too has the responsibility to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed...” (Ga. Const., Art V, Sec. II, para. II.)
Biden administration policies led to Ibarra, a member of a violent criminal gang, illegally entering our country and, after committing serious criminal offenses in New York, getting a free flight to and unsupervised living in Athens, Georgia. Safely ensconced in Georgia, Ibarra, true to his criminal impulses, brutally attacked and murdered a vibrant young woman.
Now, thanks to Gonzalez’s illegal and unethical conduct as a prosecutor, Ibarra will live out the rest of his life getting free food, shelter, and medical care at taxpayer expense.
Governor Kemp, fire Deborah Gonzalez! If justice can no longer be done to Laken Riley, at least let it be done to others who are victimized in Athens-Clarke And Oconee Counties, Georgia. And maybe Border Czar Tom Homan, you should look into her record, too.