Pittsburg: Convicted cop murderer loses bid for freedom

PITTSBURG — A judge denied a Pittsburg man’s request to transfer his murder case from adult to juvenile court, which would have meant release from prison for one of the two men convicted of murdering police officer Larry Lasater in 2005.

Andrew Moffett, 38, was days away from his 18th birthday when he and co-defendant Alexander Rashad Hamilton, 38, planned and carried out a robbery that resulted in Hamilton shooting Lasater in the neck. Both were convicted of murder, but in 2020 Moffett made an effort for a judge to rule he should have been charged as a juvenile, which would have cleared the way for his release.

In a 24-page ruling, Judge Barbara Hinton wrote that while Moffett may have had untreated ADHD at the time of the murder, he demonstrated through planning the robbery a “capacity to understand and appreciate the risks he was taking, even though he may not have factored in that someone would lose their life as a consequence of the robbery.”

“Andrew M. laid out multiple stages of the armed robbery such as: obtaining the getaway vehicle, enlisting a co-responsible, furnishing loaded firearms, surveying the parking lot, taking efforts to avoid identification, strewing various inculpatory objects in different locations, etc.,” Hinton wrote.

Hinton lauded Moffett’s efforts to seek higher education and that he’s stayed out of trouble for the last several years in prison, but also seemed skeptical of two doctors who testified for the defense. The medical experts seemed unwilling to accept the idea that Moffett would lie during interviews to get himself out of a life sentence, and took Moffett’s statements “at face value without probing much deeper into (their) veracity,” she wrote.

On April 23, 2005, Moffett and Hamilton robbed a Pittsburg grocery store and a bank branch inside the store. Lasater, 35, was responding and attempted to arrest the pair when Hamilton shot him. He died the next day.

Moffett was initially given life without parole, while Hamilton received a death sentence. But in recent years, Moffett has benefited from new laws that retroactively apply to murder cases and have affected thousands of convictions statewide. Among them were restrictions to California’s felony murder rule, an overhaul of the complex juvenile justice system, and the Racial Justice Act, which allows defendants to ask for a review of their trials to probe for racism and implicit bias that could have given them an unfair shake.

Moffett has already been re-sentenced three prior times, including in 2014, after a Supreme Court decision placed new restrictions on life without parole sentences for minors. Lasater’s brother said in 2014 that each re-sentencing hearing was “torture” for the family.