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On December 3, 2011, two-year-old Priscilla Rose Hernandez was found lifeless after the man entrusted to watch her admitted hitting her in the stomach. David Leonardo was later convicted of second-degree murder and given a sentence of 15 years to life, yet by April 23, 2024 the parole board voted to free him after he had served less than 13 years. The outrage from the child’s family and the Monterey County District Attorney was immediate and fierce, and many Americans wondered how such a brutal act could lead so quickly to a second chance behind bars. This is not justice — it’s a sickening product of a system that counts credits and programs while ignoring the broken bodies and families left behind.
Victims and prosecutors begged for a different outcome, reminding the board and the governor that Priscilla did not get a chance to grow up, to live, or to be loved beyond the moment a so-called caretaker struck her. Governor Newsom had previously stepped in to overturn an earlier parole decision in 2023, but the board’s April grant was later affirmed in September 2024, leaving the family to pick up the pieces and the public to ask why. The parole panel defended its choice by pointing to Leonardo’s prison programming and what they called mitigated risk, a phrase that reads like bureaucratic sugarcoating for putting public safety last. There is no rehabilitation that can erase a child’s death, yet liberal policies keep producing these unbearable trade-offs.
This case is symptomatic of a broader cultural and legal failure in California, where youthful offender rules and lenient parole regimes prioritize abstract ideas of redemption over the concrete reality of victims’ lives. Voters passed reforms and politicians champion “second chances,” but when those second chances mean walking out of prison after killing a toddler, something is terribly wrong. Conservatives have been warning for years that soft-on-crime orthodoxy will not make our communities safer — it will embolden predators, demoralize law enforcement, and betray innocent victims. The moral clarity of protecting children must trump any fashionable theory about rehabilitation timelines.
Make no mistake: calling a convicted toddler-killer “rehabilitated” or treating him like a low-risk case is a betrayal of commonsense justice. Families across the country rightly fear a system that prioritizes credits and checkboxes over accountability and deterrence, and they should be furious that policy makers and parole bureaucrats can strip away the sense of closure that justice is supposed to provide. If conservatives want to defend the rule of law and the safety of our neighborhoods, we must press for parole rules that center the victims, not the comforts of the incarcerated. We should demand tougher scrutiny for violent offenders, especially those who harmed children, and refuse to let ideological softness be the excuse for leaving tragedies unavenged.
Now is the time for principled action: contact elected officials, support prosecutors who stand with victims, and elect leaders who will stop treating violent criminals as a bookkeeping problem. We must rebuild a justice system that respects the sanctity of life and refuses to normalize the idea that someone who killed a child can be neatly slotted into a “case closed” category. Hardworking Americans deserve a justice system that protects their families and holds monsters accountable, not one that apologizes for them. Patriots must speak up for the voiceless and demand a system that restores safety and honors the memory of children like Priscilla.
