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Lara Gressley
Lara Gressley ran for election for Riverside County District Attorney in California. She lost in the primary on June 7, 2022.
Gressley completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Lara Gressley was born in Santa Monica, California. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1998 and a law degree from the Santa Clara University School of Law in 2002. She attended the University of Oxford law summer program in 2000. Her career experience includes working as an attorney, including as deputy county counsel, deputy public defender, and appellate and habeas attorney.[1]
Elections
2022
See also: Municipal elections in Riverside County, California (2022)
Nonpartisan primary election
Nonpartisan primary for Riverside County District Attorney
Incumbent Mike Hestrin won election outright against Lara Gressley and Burke Strunsky in the primary for Riverside County District Attorney on June 7, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Mike Hestrin (Nonpartisan) | 55.0 | 185,041 |
 | Lara Gressley (Nonpartisan)  | 22.6 | 76,003 | |
| Burke Strunsky (Nonpartisan) | 22.5 | 75,644 | ||
| Total votes: 336,688 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
2018
Nonpartisan primary election
Nonpartisan primary for Riverside County District Attorney
Incumbent Mike Hestrin won election outright against Lara Gressley in the primary for Riverside County District Attorney on June 5, 2018.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Mike Hestrin (Nonpartisan) | 66.4 | 191,753 |
| Lara Gressley (Nonpartisan) | 33.6 | 97,123 | |
| Total votes: 288,876 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Campaign themes
2022
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Lara Gressley completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Gressley's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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A highly-regarded Southern California attorney, Lara worked as Deputy Public Defender, Deputy County Counsel, and a Court-appointed Trial Attorney. Now in private practice, Lara focuses on criminal appeals and petitions for writ of habeas corpus and has done work before the United States Supreme Court.
Lara lectures lawyers across California on appeals, writs, motions, and trial work. She was a guest lecturer at Pepperdine University School of Law. Lara has been selected as a Southern California Super Lawyer in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
Lara lives in the Temecula Valley with her husband and son.- Stop the Overcharging of Criminal Offenses
- Find Real Solutions that Cut Violent Crime and Lower Recidivism Rates
- Free the Innocent and Wrongfully Convicted
Lara Gressley has the skill, experience, and proven success in criminal law to lead our DA’s office with strength, integrity, and a commitment to restore justice as our highest value. Lara will focus on prosecuting violent offenders, cleaning up the bloated DA budget, restoring the broken office morale, energizing programs for veterans, and cutting the cycles of homeless crime that plague our communities.
In 1940, US Attorney General Robert H. Jackson said it best when he described the powers of a prosecutor:
Guilty people must be punished appropriately and innocent must be set free.
We were sitting around at my law partner's hanger (he's a pilot) and he was telling a story about Dr. Hlastala who is an expert that testifies about partition ratios in DUI cases (my law partner is an expert DUI defense attorney). The blood-breath partition ratio is a number (a very general one) that reflects how much alcohol the person's lungs absorb from the person's blood. Under the California Code of Regulations, this ratio is set at 2100 to 1. He was telling us how he was in trial and had a question about this very topic, and just happened to run into Dr. Hlastala at lunch and was able to ask him. Both my partner and the doctor were not in their home counties so the encounter was fortuitous. He asked me, "I mean, what are the odds that Dr. Hlastala would be there in that town at that moment?" My answer was, "2100 to 1."
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2022 Elections
External links
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Candidate Riverside County District Attorney |
Personal |
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on March 1, 2022
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State of California Sacramento (capital) |
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