Months after Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey abruptly delivered a legal opinion that could have dismantled key protections from deportation for nonviolent drug offenders in California, her office reversed course and dropped its effort Tuesday, just after The Daily Beast asked about it.
A spokesman for Lacey — who is facing a tough reelection fight to continue helming the country’s largest prosecutor’s office in a race that now includes popular former San Francisco DA George Gascon — said that the office’s effort was “strictly limited to legal analysis” at the behest of an appeals court judge, and it had asked the court to “withdraw the office’s legal opinion once we determined the potential consequences of that scholarly opinion.”
However, the legal wrangling in this case had been going on since last year, and parties including Los Angeles Public Defender Ricardo García and state Attorney General Xavier Becerra had filed briefs siding against the DA’s office starting early last month. The DA’s attorneys were set to give oral arguments before California’s 2nd Appellate District Court last Thursday, contending that these protections for immigrants were unconstitutional.
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