California prosecutor quits after 26 years over woke DA Pamela Price’s policies: ‘victims deserve better’
A fed up veteran prosecutor ripped a radical California District Attorney for neglecting victims’ rights in a scathing resignation letter.
Danielle Hilton, who had been with the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office for nearly three decades, told embattled DA Pamela Price that she could no longer perform her duties in good conscience last week.
“Victims deserve better,” Hilton wrote, asserting Price’s radically progressive agenda has tipped the scales away from providing justice to those “devastated by violent crime.”
“I am not leaving because I want to,” Hilton wrote in the missive posted to Twitter. “In fact, I want nothing more than to be an African American woman continuing to serve the citizens of Alameda County in a fair, unbiased and professional manner.”
Elected to office in November, Price has come under increasing scrutiny for doing away with most sentencing enhancements in a bid to lower jail terms.
She caused outrage last week after declining to attach enhancements to a case where three gangbangers were arrested for shooting a 5-year-old dead on a freeway in Fremont last month.
In a leaked memo, Price had previously urged her prosecutors to embrace probation for most crimes, including felonies, according to reports.
Critics have pointed out the majority of violent crime victims in Alameda County are African-American and Hispanic, while Hilton asserted Price’s agenda is producing the “very type of inequities and disparate treatment that you say you were elected to combat.”
The case of the slain five-year-old, Eliyanah Crisostomo, was a huge break in years of precedent set by District Attorneys across the state.
“Not filing gun and gang enhancements in a case like this is an extreme departure from California criminal law practice,” veteran Los Angeles County prosecutor Jason Lustig told The Post last week of Price’s approach to the case.
Enhancements to murder charges can spell the difference between a term of 15 to 25 years in prison and life without parole.
Price has also declined to say if she will keep criminal enhancements imposed by her predecessor in a similar case involving a slain child.
Jasper Wu, 2, was fatally hit by a stray bullet while riding in a car with his mom in Oakland in 2021. A trio of gang members were arrested in connection with that case and are now facing murder charges.
Former Alameda County DA Nancy O’Malley applied several enhancements seeking to maximize potential jail terms — but Price has not yet indicatred whether she will preserve them.
Hilton wrote that Price refused had also refused to correspond with her about her concerns.
“I have spent my career picking up the pieces and gathering the fragments of lives shattered by violence,” she wrote. “I encourage you to look at crime scene and autopsy photos, meet the victims of the robberies, sexual assaults, home burglaries and other crimes within the county. It is their voices you were elected to empower,” she wrote in the resignation letter.
Price has pushed back on criticism of her term, arguing she is under attack because she is Alameda County’s first black DA and unabashedly progressive.
Price said she is attempting to undo entrenched inequities within the county’s prosecutorial conventions.
“If you are a Black person in Alameda County, you are 20 times more likely to be incarcerated than a White person,” she said last month. “Racial injustice in this county is what we all need to be firmly committed against.”
