A federal judge said Tuesday he will allow prosecutors to downgrade charges against an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy — who was already convicted of a felony in an excessive force case this year — but the law enforcement officer could still get prison time.
In issuing his decision Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson stymied a highly unusual legal maneuver pushed last month by Bill Essayli, the newly appointed U.S. attorney in Los Angeles. The Trump-appointed prosecutor moved to offer Deputy Trevor Kirk a misdemeanor plea deal just two months after he was convicted of a felony for pepper-spraying and assaulting an unarmed woman while responding to a purported robbery at a Lancaster supermarket in 2023.
Essayli’s decision to offer Kirk the rare postconviction plea deal played a role in several federal prosecutors resigning their posts this month.
While Wilson rejected the controversial maneuver from Essayli — in which Kirk would be sentenced to probation — he did grant the prosecution’s motion to lessen the charges against the deputy to a misdemeanor despite the jury conviction. Kirk could still face some jail or prison time when he is sentenced June 2.
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
“We are very pleased to receive the news of the Court granting the motion to reduce this case to a misdemeanor,” said Tom Yu, the deputy’s defense attorney, in a written statement. “We will be working very diligently to formulate a compelling argument for a no jail time sentence.”
Kirk would have been unable to continue a career in law enforcement or own a gun if convicted of a felony. He
was convicted in February of one count of deprivation of rights under color of law after he was caught on camera rushing at the victim, Jacey Houseton, hurling her to the ground and then pepper-spraying her in the face while planting a knee on her neck during the 2023 incident.
Kirk originally faced up to 10 years in prison, but that was upended after the Trump administration appointed Essayli, a former California Assembly member, as U.S. attorney for Los Angeles. Essayli authorized the rare post-trial plea agreement with Kirk.
Essayli is a staunch Trump ally and hard-line conservative appointed at a time when the president has sought to weaken the independence of the U.S. Department of Justice. The post-trial plea agreement landed the same week Trump issued an executive order vowing to “unleash” American law enforcement.
Under the agreement authorized by Essayli, Kirk would have served a maximum of one year in prison. The government agreed to recommend a year of probation and moved to strike the jury’s finding that Kirk had injured the victim, which made the crime a felony.
Wilson found the plea deal to be unnecessary because of the jury verdict, and said a sentence of probation “did not match the facts of this case.”
“Defendant committed the offense — the willful use of unreasonable force — while acting under color of law as a police officer,” Wilson wrote. “Police officers are entrusted with protecting the public, not harming them.”
Caree Harper, Houseton’s attorney, called the ruling “heartbreaking” and “a travesty of justice.”
“There is no integrity anymore,” she said. “For the prosecutor to argue against his own attorneys, they put their blood, sweat and tears into this case … they got a felony guilty verdict.”
She also said of Kirk: “Theoretically he can go somewhere and be a cop now again. Outrageous. This is so wrong on so many different levels. This is heartbreakingly wrong.”
The agreement caused turmoil in the U.S. attorney’s office, with Assistant U.S. Attys. Eli A. Alcaraz, Brian R. Faerstein, Michael J. Morse and Cassie Palmer, chief of the Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section, all withdrawing from the case. Rob Keenan, the only assistant U.S. attorney who signed off on the plea agreement, was not previously involved in the case.
Alcaraz, Faerstein and Palmer submitted their resignations after the plea agreement offer, sources previously confirmed to The Times. A filing submitted in the case this month also confirmed that Palmer is departing the federal prosecutor’s office.
The ruling followed a tense hearing last week during which Wilson grilled Keenan, appearing increasingly perplexed at the government’s logic in offering Kirk a deal. He questioned whether prosecutors had a “serious and significant doubt” as to the deputy’s guilt and continually pushed Keenan to justify the deal.
Keenan claimed the deal was “a pure exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”
In June 2023, Kirk was responding to a reported robbery when he threw Houseton to the ground and pepper-sprayed her in the face while she filmed him outside a Lancaster WinCo. Houseton matched a dispatcher’s description of a female suspect, but she was not armed or committing a crime at the time Kirk first confronted her, court records show.
“He kept telling me to stop resisting even though I could not move, and I could not breathe. I thought he was trying to kill me,” Houseton told the court last week. She compared Kirk placing a knee on her neck to the maneuver a white Minneapolis police officer used in 2020 that killed George Floyd, a Black man being arrested on suspicion of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.
In court, Keenan described Kirk’s use of force as excessive, but just “barely so,” at one point attacking the credibility of the victim in the case, suggesting she exaggerated her injuries in a victim impact statement she made before the court.
Wilson did not accept that analysis.
“The jury was completely justified in finding he used excessive force in taking her to the ground and pepper-spraying her,” the judge said. “Had he ordered her to be handcuffed … that would be a different case.”
In a sentencing recommendation obtained by The Times, Sheriff Robert Luna asked Wilson to sentence Kirk to probation, blaming his actions that day on poor training, stemming from the fact that the Sheriff’s Department had not properly followed reforms ordered by the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division.
