Judge rejects woman’s bid for re-sentencing in the case of 8-year-old son who she tortured to death theavtimes.com

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A Los Angeles judge on Tuesday rejected a bid for re-sentencing by Pearl Fernandez, the Palmdale woman who pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of her 8-year-old son Gabriel Fernandez.

Fernandez, now 37, and her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, are both convicted in the brutal 2013 torture and killing of her son.

Fernandez was sentenced in March 2018 to life in prison without the possibility of parole, but contended in an April 1 2021 petition that she could not now be convicted of first-degree murder or second-degree murder because of recent changes in California state law that affect defendants in some murder cases.

Her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, 40, was sentenced to death. His automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court is pending.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge George G. Lomeli said he carefully reviewed Fernandez’s petition for re-sentencing along with the overall record of the case and concluded that she is “not entitled to re-sentencing relief.”

At the March 2018 sentencing for Fernandez and Aguirre, the judge called the case “without a doubt the most aggravated and egregious case of torture this court has ever witnessed.”

“You want to say that the conduct was animalistic, but that would be wrong because even animals know how to take care of their young … It’s beyond animalistic,” Lomeli said then, noting that he hoped the two defendants would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about what they had done to the boy.

In denying an automatic motion to reduce the jury’s recommendation of a death sentence for Aguirre to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the judge cited the “repeated beating, binding, burning and starving” of the youngster. Read more

Fernandez’s case was the subject of a six-part Netflix documentary released last year titled “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez.” Read more>>