State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris doubled down on his bid to end cash bail and refused to walk back his tone-deaf take on Pedro Hernandez, the darling of bail reformers who was arrested this week on an attempted-murder warrant.
In seven years, Hernandez, 22, has at least 13 arrests, including three gun charges and two armed robbery charges, according to records.
He was arrested Monday and charged with attempted murder for an Aug. 28 shooting outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Hernandez is suspected of firing a single shot into an occupied red Mercedes Benz after losing cash and a gold chain in a three-card monte game, authorities said. No one was hit.
In July 2017, Gianaris (D-Queens) tweeted he was “reissuing” his call for an end to cash bail and that Hernandez was “the latest example of a system that discriminates on the basis of wealth.”
Hernandez spent more than a year on Rikers Island after refusing to take a no-jail plea deal for a 2015 Bronx shooting. He couldn’t make the $250,000 bail, or the later reduced $100,000 bail, so he remained locked up.
The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation bailed him out in 2017 and turned him into a cause celebre for woke crusaders. The charges were eventually dropped — after his alleged victim recanted his identification and another witness stopped cooperating.
But even after the career criminal was charged with attempted murder this week, Gianaris still pleaded his case.
“Trying to connect an attempted murder case to bail reform exposes the demagoguery of those scaring people to score political points,” Gianaris said to The Post.
“If [Hernandez] is found guilty of the current charges, he should absolutely be punished accordingly,” Gianaris conceded.
Critics disagreed.
“If anyone is a demagogue, it’s the Senator,” said Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “Instead of appealing to the rational argument that something is wrong, he continues to gaslight the people of New York state.”
At Tuesday’s arraignment on the attempted murder case, Manhattan Criminal Court judge Michael Gaffey opted to jail Hernandez without bail due to his prior arrests.
