Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, who faces a recall election on November 5, 2024, has recommended a lenient resentencing in the case of Michael Augustine Lopez. Lopez is in prison for the torture and murder of his girlfriend’s granddaughter.

Lopez was convicted in 2001 of charges including first-degree murder and a special-circumstance allegation of torture in the killing of Ashley Demichino, who suffered a skull fracture, bruises all over her body and genital injuries. Prosecutors said Lopez abused the infant for a week before he picked her up and threw her to the ground, which resulted in her death.

The details are as repulsive as it gets.

Sometime after Ashley's death, S.B. (Ashley’s five-year-old sister) was removed from (Sandra, Ashley and S.B.’s grandmother and the girlfriend of Lopez) Harris's care and placed in emergency foster care. Child Protective Services (CPS) permitted S.B. to attend Ashley's funeral, at which time she informed Laurie that she had seen Lopez thrusting his torso on Ashley. In mid-July, S.B.’s great-aunt Cindy Jardin was awarded temporary custody of S.B. While in Jardin's care, S.B. told her aunt that she had seen Lopez punch Ashley in the chest, stomach, and genital area. S.B. told her next foster mother that Lopez had previously broken her leg. When her foster mother asked S.B. if Lopez had ever touched “his private part to [her] private part,” S.B. said that “he only did that to Ashley.”

Price, unsurprisingly, made no public announcement regarding the requested resentencing.

On Oct. 14, in line with the request from District Attorney Pamela Price's office, which did not publicly announce the move, Superior Court Judge Thomas Stevens resentenced Lopez to 26 years to life for second-degree murder, a lewd act on a child and a great bodily injury enhancement. Taking into account the time he has spent in custody — since his arrest in 1999 — and positive behavior in prison, officials will determine when he will be eligible for parole.

Price’s office’s explanation for the recommended resentencing is astonishing.

In court documents, Deputy District Attorney Aimee Solway asked for the resentencing "in the interest of justice."

The motion referenced Lopez's past claim that the trial prosecutor excluded jurors of color from his jury based on their race. The prosecutor was accused of bias against jurors in another death sentence that was overturned, but unlike other cases in which Price's office found jury selection notes that indicated prosecutors tracked jurors' race, there were no jury selection notes in Lopez's case file, Solway said. As a result, the office was unable to "take a firm position" on the matter, but, Solway said, "further litigation of this claim could potentially result in" an overturned conviction.

Solway also said the crime is "more consistent with" child abuse resulting in death than murder, and that the case was prosecuted inequitably when compared to other killings of children in which prosecutors did not pursue charges that carried the death penalty. She said there was doubt as to whether Lopez intended to kill or torture Ashley, citing in part a low IQ on his part that she said possibly impacted his ability to care for the infant.

Let us review. Deputy District Attorney Solway would have us believe that Lopez was too stupid to know that torturing and murdering an infant was possibly not correct behavior. Solway would also have us believe that skin color trumps physical evidence, including the inconvenient fact that blood is red regardless of an individual’s skin pigmentation. I’m still trying to wrap my head around Solway’s assertion that the crime is “more consistent with” child abuse resulting in death than murder. So, abuse resulting in death is somehow a lesser crime, or different, than murder? I am no legal eagle, but that seems like semantics taken to the ultimate in silliness.

What is in no way silly is that a district attorney, by her actions, values the life of a murderer more than an innocent child. Every San Francisco Bay Area newspaper, including the East Bay Times and San Francisco Chronicle, both of which reliably lean so far left they make MSNBC look like Newsmax, has endorsed Price’s recall. With actions such as this, Price clearly agrees with them but is too lazy to quit instead of being fired by the voters.