The sentence handed to Loay Abdel Fattah Alnaji, 53, who pleaded guilty to charges related to the 2023 death of a 69-year-old Jewish man near Los Angeles, amounted to “little more than a slap on the wrist,” Joshua Burt, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Central Pacific Region, told JNS.
Alnaji was sentenced Tuesday to two years of probation and one year in county jail after pleading guilty in May to felony involuntary manslaughter and felony battery causing serious bodily injury.
The fatal confrontation occurred during simultaneous pro-Israel and anti-Israel rallies in Thousand Oaks, Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles, in November 2023. Prosecutors said Alnaji struck Paul Kessler in the head with a megaphone, causing him to fall backward and hit his head on the pavement. Kessler later died from injuries sustained in the incident.
Alnaji also admitted personally inflicting great bodily injury and acknowledged aggravating factors that he used a weapon and that Kessler was particularly vulnerable, according to prosecutors.
Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said Kessler “lost his life in a violent attack that took him from his family and his wife of 43 years.”
“Given the circumstances of this case and the death that resulted, we believe a state prison commitment was the appropriate and just sentence,” he said.
Jewish leaders and Jewish advocacy groups criticized the sentencing.
“We are deeply disappointed by the lenient sentence handed down to Paul Kessler’s killer,” Burt told JNS. The sentence “is little more than a slap on the wrist and not in proportion with the enormity of this crime.”
Burt said the court spent much of the sentencing hearing “expressing dismay” with letters submitted by members of the Jewish community and asking the district attorney’s office to “make a statement correcting the perceptions of the 132 community members who felt compelled to express how this woefully inadequate sentence would impact them.”
“Despite the court’s pointed statements about the Jewish community, the judge never once expressed dismay at the defendant who took Paul Kessler’s life,” Burt told JNS. “The judge merely asked the defendant to stay late to sign some paperwork.”
“Our system of justice needed to send a strong message here,” he said. “Instead, the message being sent is that you can get away with attacking someone in broad daylight because you disagree with their opinions, especially if it involves feelings about Israel.”
He added that the verdict comes as the Jewish community faces an “unprecedented surge in antisemitism,” including more than 800 antisemitic incidents in California in 2025 alone.
“This verdict does little to restore our faith in the justice system and its ability to protect us,” Burt said.
Alyza Lewin, president of U.S. affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement, told JNS that “as antisemitic protests turn increasingly violent, a dangerous trend closely monitored by CAM since Oct. 7, 2023, it’s essential for our legal system to deter, not embolden, unlawful conduct targeting Jews.”
“The disturbingly lenient sentence for Loay Abdel Fattah Alnaji does just the opposite,” she said. “Rather than serving as a warning to potential assailants, making clear that assaults which lead to death will be punished severely, this sentence emboldens would-be perpetrators of antisemitic aggression.”
“I fear it is only a matter of time before more Jews like Paul Kessler pay the price,” Lewin said.
Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at the Lawfare Project, told JNS that “to call this sentence an outrage doesn’t do it justice.”
“It exposes major flaws in the criminal justice system that need to be addressed—from the prosecutor declining to charge this as the hate crime it was and undercharging conduct that should have carried a mandatory term, to a judge whose slap-on-the-wrist sentencing is taken by many to devalue Jewish life,” he said. “It is hard to see this as justice for Paul Kessler’s family, let alone for a Jewish community under constant siege.”
Filitti added that “until the criminal justice system treats antisemitic violence as what it is, the next Paul Kessler is already at a rally somewhere.”
Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that “a man who admits he attacked a vulnerable victim with a weapon does not get probation in any ordinary courtroom in California.”
“Run the substitution test. A 69-year-old black man holding a civil rights banner is struck in the face and killed by a counterprotester who admits he swung a weapon at a vulnerable victim,” he said. “Does that defendant walk in a year? Everyone knows the answer.”
