Pearl Fernandez, the Los Angeles County mother convicted of the torture and murder of her 8-year-old son Gabriel Fernandez, allegedly filed a petition to drop her conviction.
Fernandez (now 37) and her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, are both convicted of the brutal murder of their eight-year-old son, Gabriel Fernandez, in 2013.
Gabriel Fernandez and his mother Pearl Fernandez.
(Facebook / Getty Images)
Fernandez argued in her petition that she could not be convicted of first- or second-degree murder due to recent amendments to the California Penal Code 1170.95.
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Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Hatami downplayed the changes, saying they ‘encourage child murderers to apply for re-sentencing’.
“Gabriel’s family must now relive all the horror that a small and helpless child committed,” Hatami tweeted Thursday afternoon. “It’s simply wrong and completely unfair.”
Prosecutors said social workers left 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez with his mother and Aguirre at his home in Palmdale, despite several investigations into alleged child abuse. Prosecutors said the boy was targeted for abuse because the couple believed he was gay.
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He was repeatedly beaten, starved, tied up and sometimes put to sleep in a cabinet, authorities said. An autopsy revealed that the boy had a broken skull, multiple ribs and burns to his body.
Fernandez pleaded guilty in 2018 to first-degree murder and pleaded guilty to a special circumstance of murder with torture. Aguirre was convicted of the same charge the previous year and received the death penalty.
The case was the subject of a six-part Netflix documentary released last year entitled “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez.”
Fernandez’s death has caused an avalanche of criticism of the country’s child and family services department and serves as a warning to child protection workers anywhere who would ignore signs of child abuse.
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A trial for Fernandez’s petition has been scheduled for June 1 before Los Angeles Supreme Court Justice George G. Lomeli, who sentenced her to life in prison in June 2018 without the possibility of parole.
Fox News’ Louis Casiano and Frank Miles contributed to this report.