Judge, prosecutor spar over plan to give lenient deal to L.A. deputy after conviction

A federal judge will decide later this week whether to allow an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy to take a plea deal that would spare him from prison time months after he was convicted of pepper-spraying an unarmed woman who filmed him during a 2023 arrest.

In a Monday court hearing, Judge Stephen V. Wilson and Assistant U.S. Atty. Rob Keenan sparred for more than two hours over the federal government’s highly unusual legal maneuver to offer L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy Trevor Kirk a misdemeanor plea deal just two months after he was convicted of a felony in the excessive force case.

Kirk 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, hurling her to the ground and then pepper-spraying her in the face while planting a knee on her neck during a 2023 incident outside a Lancaster supermarket.

Wilson said he would rule on the motion to accept the plea in the next “three or four days.”

Kirk faced up to a decade in prison at sentencing.

But that was upended after the Trump administration last month appointed Bill Essayli, a former California Assembly member, as U.S. attorney for Los Angeles. On May 1, prosecutors reached a rare post-trial plea agreement with Kirk.

The government recommended a one-year term of probation for Kirk and moved to strike the jury’s finding that Kirk had injured the victim, which made the crime a felony. Kirk agreed to plead guilty to a lesser-included misdemeanor violation of deprivation of rights under color of law.

The agreement caused turmoil in the U.S. attorney’s office, with assistant U.S. attorneys 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. 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 post-trial plea agreement offer, sources previously confirmed to The Times. A filing submitted in the case last week also confirmed that Palmer is departing the federal prosecutor’s office.

The incident mirrored turmoil at the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan that followed pressure by Trump administration officials to drop a corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

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 Department of Justice. Essayli made the post-conviction plea offer to Kirk the same week Trump issued an executive order vowing to “unleash” American law enforcement.

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In court Monday, 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.

“If the government hasn’t offered any explanation for its change of course, the court must grant the motion?” Wilson asked.

Keenan said he believed the court was legally obligated to do so, claiming the deal was “a pure exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”

In June 2023, Kirk was responding to a reported robbery when he threw a woman to the ground and pepper-sprayed her in the face while she filmed him outside a Lancaster WinCo. The woman — who is identified in federal court filings only as J.H. but is named as Jacey Houseton in a separate civil suit — 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 Monday. 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.

But in a 31-page position statement filed May 13, Keenan dissected the victim’s actions leading up to and during the confrontation with Kirk. Keenan said Kirk only used the pepper spray after “continued resistance by J.H.”

“In contrast to other excessive-force cases, defendant did not use pepper spray after J.H. was cuffed or otherwise secured,” Keenan wrote.

Keenan said the evidence didn’t show that Kirk sprayed Houseton in the face with an intent to cause bodily injury. He also described her injuries as “limited in duration and severity” and said they did not constitute “serious bodily injury.”

In the filing, Keenan appeared to question the government’s evidence relating to a reported “blunt head injury,” calling it “vague and ill-defined even at trial.”

In court Monday, 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.”

Keenan also argued his colleagues were unfair to Kirk at trial, claiming they relied too heavily on the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s use-of-force manual as evidence and reached an inaccurate conclusion that Kirk attacked Houseton because she was filming him. Although the video shows Kirk reaching for Houseton’s phone, Keenan insisted the deputy had every right to detain Houseton as a robbery suspect and was simply grabbing for the arm closest to him.

“I guess I’m writing their appellate brief for them,” Keenan said, nodding to Kirk’s defense team.

Wilson had previously denied a motion from Kirk’s defense attorney, Tom Yu, seeking an acquittal. The judge found that footage of the incident was sufficient evidence for a jury to find Kirk had used “objectively unreasonable force.”

“J.H. did not have a weapon, did not attack Defendant, was not attempting to flee, and was not actively committing a crime,” Wilson wrote in his ruling last month.

The judge also noted that, while Kirk acted aggressively toward Houseton from the outset, his partner managed to lead the arrest of the other robbery suspect without using force.

Keenan painted the concessions Kirk made in the post-trial agreement as “significant.” He said Kirk was agreeing to admit that he “used unnecessary force” while attempting to detain Houseton and that he did so “willfully.”

In early 2024, shortly after the WinCo incident, Kirk was arrested by his own department on suspicion of domestic violence against his wife. His attorney dismissed it as a nonissue, noting that the victim did not want Kirk to be prosecuted, contending the alleged abuse was reported by a third party. A spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said the case was rejected due to insufficient evidence.

Houseton’s attorney, Caree Harper, also said in a court filing last week that during that incident Kirk “threatened to bury [his wife] in the desert,” records show.

A Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Support for Kirk began gaining steam on social media after his indictment last September. In January, Nick Wilson, founder of a first responder advocacy group and spokesperson for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Professional Assn., wrote a letter to Trump urging him to intervene before the case went to trial.

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Former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who has become increasingly popular in right-wing circles online, has also championed Kirk’s case, posting an Instagram video of himself and Wilson consoling the deputy at the courthouse after trial. Both Villanueva and Wilson have insisted Kirk did nothing wrong.

Villanueva, Wilson and Essayli were all present in court Monday. At one point Harper approached Essayli directly and asked about the legality of the plea deal he was offering.

Essayli, seated in a plastic chair because all of the benches in the courtroom were filled, threatened to have Harper removed from the courtroom after a brief back-and-forth. Harper noted that only judges and federal marshals have the right to remove someone from a courtroom. A U.S. attorney’s office spokesperson declined to comment.

Some deputies have also blamed current Sheriff Robert Luna for pushing federal prosecutors to go after Kirk, an accusation Luna has denied. Some deputy groups have staged forms of protest against Luna as a result.

But in a sentencing recommendation obtained by The Times, Luna asked Wilson to sentence Kirk to probation, blaming his actions that day on poor training.

He said that prior department leaders had in effect ignored a monitoring agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice that was meant to mandate reform policies on use-of-force issues at the Lancaster and Palmdale stations. Luna’s letter did not address whether Wilson should act on Essayli’s request to vacate the jury verdict.

“I’m not suggesting that the failures of the Department should immunize Deputy Kirk or any other deputy taking responsibility for their actions,” Luna wrote. “No deputy who is found by a jury to have used excessive force or who has agreed to a plea deal should have such immunity.”