California is the capital of performative reform and political theater dressed up as justice. The system is no longer calibrated to law, facts, or fairness, it is calibrated to narrative. And when storytelling becomes the operating system of prosecution, justice doesn’t simply stall. It runs backward.
For years now, prosecutors have been engineering outcomes by stretching statutes, bending precedent, and weaponizing reform laws meant to protect defendants. Nowhere is this misconduct more evident than in the application of the Watson murder doctrine, a statute that was originally intended to punish chronic DUI offenders but has been refashioned into a catch-all murder escalator.
A close second to Watson in this epidemic of prosecutorial overreach is the California Racial Justice Act (CRJA). Enacted to identify and prevent bias, the CRJA has instead been turned into a political shield, invoked rhetorically, but rarely applied meaningfully.
Nowhere is this distorted, politicized approach to prosecution more evident than in Los Angeles County, where three high-profile cases, Rebecca Grossman, Fraser Bohm, and Summer Wheaton, expose how optics, timing, and public outrage have replaced evidence and law.
This is justice in reverse. And Los Angeles is drowning in it.
THE ERA OF REFORM: HOW GEORGE GASCÓN REWIRED JUSTICE IN LOS ANGELES
Shortly after the George Floyd protests in 2020, amid the national reckoning on policing and prosecution, Los Angeles became ground zero for the progressive “reform” movement. Backed by millions in funding from George Soros–aligned political action committees, George Gascón was elected Los Angeles County District Attorney, a candidate engineered to embody the new justice narrative: empathy for offenders, rhetoric for victims, and optics for activists.
Gascón was sworn in on December 7, 2020. Within twenty-four hours, he began dismantling decades of prosecutorial structure, issuing blanket directives eliminating sentencing enhancements, restricting special-circumstance filings, and ordering deputies to abandon legal provisions they were sworn to uphold.
Twenty-three days later, on December 30, 2020, the inevitable backlash arrived. The union representing Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorneys filed suit against their own boss, accusing him of forcing prosecutors to break the law in service of his ideology.
Their complaint read, in part:
“Gascón’s blanket prohibition on enhancements forces us to either violate our oath to apply the law or our duties within the office. This is unlawful and cannot stand.”
It was a legal revolt from inside the building, a warning shot that the “reform” wave had crossed from policy into lawlessness. From that moment forward, the office stopped being a temple of justice and became a laboratory for political experiment, with public safety as the test subject.
THE WATSON RULE: A NARROW DOCTRINE TURNED INTO A BROAD WEAPON
The backbone of prosecutorial escalation in vehicular fatality cases that occurred under now-former D.A. Gascón is People v. Watson, the 1981 California Supreme Court decision that allowed second-degree murder charges in fatal DUI cases, but only when the driver had clear prior warnings about the lethal risks of impaired driving and acted with conscious disregard for human life.
Watson was designed for one scenario: a repeat drunk driver who kills someone after being explicitly warned.
It was never intended for sober drivers.
It was never intended for first-time offenders.
It was never intended for collisions clouded by missing evidence, multiple vehicles, or unclear sequencing.
But in Los Angeles, prosecutors discovered that Watson made for excellent headlines. They realized that if the public wanted a villain, and the media wanted a morality play, the doctrine could be stretched far beyond its guardrails. And once prosecutors detached Watson from its original purpose, every high-profile crash became a potential murder case, regardless of whether the legal standard was met.
Watson is no longer being applied. It’s being performed.
A deeper look into the Grossman, Bohm, and Wheaton cases exposes how far that performance has gone.
CASE #1: REBECCA GROSSMAN – A MURDER CASE BUILT ON POLITICAL TIMING
The September 29, 2020 collision in Westlake Village that killed two young boys was tragic, but tragedy is not murder. Rebecca Grossman’s blood alcohol content was within the legal limit, she was not charged with DUI, and her vehicle’s Mercedes-Benz emergency system automatically contacted 911 after her airbags deployed. Yet, on December 30, 2020, just three months later, Gascón’s office charged her with two counts of second-degree murder, vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, and fleeing the scene.
The case was filled with conflicting witness testimony, missing vehicle evidence, and unanswered forensic questions, yet the DA’s office fast-tracked charges, making it his first “message case.” It became a media event, the prototype for a new prosecutorial strategy built not on law, but on optics.
CASE #2: FRASER BOHM – MURDER ON DEAD MAN’S CURVE?
The October 17, 2023 crash that killed four Pepperdine students was horrific. But horror does not equal murder. Bohm had no alcohol in his system, no prior DUI, no Watson admonition, and no evidence of intent or malice. Yet, only eight days later, on October 25, 2023, Gascón’s office charged him with four counts of second-degree murder and four counts of gross vehicular manslaughter.
Bohm’s case involved a notoriously dangerous stretch of Pacific Coast Highway, conflicting eyewitness accounts, and unanswered engineering questions about the road itself, but the filing came almost instantly. In Los Angeles, speed has replaced substance. The faster the headline, the better the optics.
CASE #3: SUMMER WHEATON – THE DEFENDANT WHO ACTUALLY FIT THE WATSON RULE AND GOT THE DEAL
On July 4, 2023, Summer Wheaton was driving on PCH in Malibu after leaving the Nobu White Party when she veered across lanes and collided with another vehicle, killing 44-year-old Uber driver Martin Okeke instantly. The road was clear. The cause was direct. And the evidence of intoxication was overwhelming.
Malibu Daily News reported that Wheaton had a prior misdemeanor for possession as a minor and had previously posted a video on social media referring to herself as “tipsy”, mocking a female police officer as several of her “drunk friends drove by.”
Yet despite the clear facts and prior behavior which could legally prove implied malice, Wheaton’s case moved at a crawl. She wasn’t charged until February 24, 2025, nearly seven months later. Her charges: vehicular manslaughter, and DUI, not murder.
Wheaton entered a not-guilty plea in March to gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and two related felony counts stemming from the devastating July 4th crash. Prosecutors say she left an exclusive event at Nobu before her Mercedes veered across the center median on Pacific Coast Highway and slammed head-on into rideshare driver Martin Okeke’s Cadillac, killing him instantly.
While Grossman and Bohm faced immediate Watson murder filings amid unresolved evidence and media pressure, Wheaton, whose case most closely fit Watson’s original intent, received the benefit of silence and restraint.
This is the true face of selective prosecution under Gascón: the harsher the optics, the quicker the charge. The clearer the case, the softer the landing. Everyone is free to draw their own conclusions about why then-D.A. Gascon raced to file Watson murder charges against Grossman and Bohm, while running out the clock on his failed administration without charging Wheaton. Did Grossman and Bohm make safer political targets because they were known to be wealthy and privileged, while Wheaton is a young woman of color who doesn’t check either of those boxes?
What is clear is that the new D.A. Nathan Hochman respected the intent of the Watson doctrine—that it is to be applied only in extraordinary circumstances, not as a political weapon. Hochman’s chose not to charge Wheaton with murder even though her case fit the parameters of a Watson case much more closely than Grossman’s or Bohm’s.A TALE OF TIMING: JUSTICE ON A POLITICAL CLOCK
Gascon charged Rebecca Grossman three months after the crash.
Gascon charged Fraser Bohm in eight days.
Gascon never charged Summer Wheaton at all, leaving it to his successor, seven months later.
When it came to Summer Wheaton’s case, a clear-cut DUI fatality with no evidentiary confusion, no missing vehicles, no forensic ambiguity, the prosecution slowed to a crawl. Seven months. No murder charge. No Watson theory despite her history of misdemeanor possession as a minor, and video posted on social media utterly unfazed by the life-and-death stakes of driving drunk. Her case received the kind of measured restraint Gascón refused to show Grossman or Bohm, even though their cases were dramatically more complicated and legally unsettled.
Wheaton’s charges didn’t arrive until February 24, 2025, nearly seven months after the crash, and she was charged with manslaughter. Perhaps, under the new Hochman administration, the DA will take a more measured approach in labeling tragic accidents murder. But one thing is for certain, the Gascon administration mixed politics with prosecution.
Under Gascón, the Watson Rule was never a legal doctrine. It was a prop. A performance piece. A prosecutorial tool dragged onstage whenever outrage culture needed feeding. Compassion was granted selectively. Contradiction was built into the script. Tragedy was criminalized for some, minimized for others, and the law became whatever his administration needed it to be on any given day.
Los Angeles didn’t just lose its moral compass, it rewired it to track public outrage instead of legal principle.
George Gascon may be gone, but he is far from forgotten. The influence of his failed policies still lingers in the prosecutorial ranks of the D.A.’s office. Until the county confronts the political manipulation embedded in its prosecutorial timing, justice here will remain exactly what Gascón left behind: a performance disguised as prosecution, spinning backward while insisting it’s moving forward.
Follow Us