How a Plea Deal Kept David Leroy French Out of Prison

The legal question in David Leroy French’s aggravated assault case is not solved by asking why a judge chose probation after a gun case. The better question is how the case reached a sentencing posture where probation was available at all. On the public record now available, the answer is a category change: the dangerous-nature allegation was removed in the plea process, and that removal changed the sentencing gate.

That distinction matters because French’s earlier conviction is now being read through the lens of the July 2026 downtown Tucson shooting case. Tucson Sentinel reported that French was charged with 18 assault counts after a shooting that injured nine people, and that he had previously pleaded guilty in a 2025 aggravated assault case involving an AR-15-style rifle fired at a car wash employee’s vehicle.[1] Those are not trivial facts. But they do not, by themselves, explain the sentence.

The sentence becomes understandable only after the plea terms are put in the right order. According to Tucson Sentinel’s court-record reporting, the Pima County Attorney’s Office agreed to a plea deal that dropped both a firearm-discharge count and the dangerous-nature allegation tied to the aggravated assault case.[1] Once that happened, the court was no longer sentencing a dangerous offense. It was sentencing a non-dangerous Class 3 felony.

The plea deal changed the sentencing category before the judge reached punishment

Loose language about this case can make it sound as if the court faced a mandatory-prison gun offense and simply declined to impose prison. That is not what the available reporting supports. The legally important move happened earlier, when the prosecution agreed to remove the dangerous classification from the conviction path.

Arizona’s aggravated assault statute includes several felony classifications, and it separately defines “dangerous offense” to include an offense involving the discharge, use, or threatening exhibition of a deadly weapon or dangerous instrument, or the intentional or knowing infliction of serious physical injury.[2] In sentencing practice, that label is not decorative. It changes what the court is allowed to do.

The Arizona felony sentencing guide cited below describes a dangerous Class 3 felony as carrying mandatory incarceration with a 5-to-15-year range, while a non-dangerous Class 3 felony carries a 2-to-8.75-year range and may be probation eligible depending on the case posture.[3] That is the legal hinge. A judge choosing probation after the dangerous designation has been dropped is not the same event as a judge disregarding a mandatory-prison dangerous offense.

Why the firearm facts did not automatically make prison mandatory

The frustrating part of this case, for anyone reading the facts quickly, is that the conduct still looks like the kind of conduct Arizona’s dangerous-offense rules are designed to capture. Tucson Sentinel reported that the earlier case involved French firing an AR-15-style rifle at a car wash worker’s vehicle.[1] The public instinct is to move straight from that factual description to a mandatory-prison conclusion.

But sentencing does not operate on the headline version of the facts. It operates on the conviction, the admitted elements, and any enhancement or dangerous-nature allegation that remains legally in play. If the dangerous allegation is charged and proven, the court is in one sentencing lane. If the allegation is dismissed as part of a plea, the court is in another.

That is why the dropped firearm-discharge count and the dropped dangerous-nature allegation should not be treated as incidental plea paperwork. They are the paperwork. They explain how a case involving alleged gunfire could end in a probation-eligible conviction.

The probation department’s role was not cosmetic

Once probation became legally available, the next institutional actor was not simply the judge. Tucson Sentinel reported that the probation department assessed French and recommended intensive probation.[1] That recommendation does not answer whether the plea should have been offered. It does show that, inside the post-plea sentencing framework, the department did not treat the only choices as prison or nothing.

There is a limit to what can be said here. The full probation report has not been made public in the materials available for this article. That means there is no responsible way to reconstruct the department’s complete reasoning, risk assessment, or factual weighting. The public record supports only the narrower point: after the dangerous designation was removed, the probation department recommended intensive probation rather than a straightforward prison disposition.[1]

Judge J. Alan Goodwin then ordered standard probation, rather than the intensive probation recommended by the department, according to Tucson Sentinel.[1] That is a judicial choice, but it is a choice made after the plea had already moved the case out of the mandatory-prison category. Calling the outcome “leniency” without that sequencing is too blunt to be useful.

Active probation does not mean the prior sentence was dormant

KVOA reported that Pima County Attorney Laura Conover said French was under active probation supervision in the prior case at the time of the July 2026 shooting, and that there were “no documented infractions” before the new allegations.[4] That point matters because it rules out one easy but imprecise version of the story: that the probation order had somehow become a dead letter before the new case.

It does not prove probation was effective. It does not prove the supervision level was sufficient. It means only that, according to the public statement reported by KVOA, the probation system had not documented violations before the July 2026 shooting.[4] A later criminal allegation can expose the limits of supervision without retroactively proving that every earlier supervising officer had a documented warning in hand.

Character material belongs in the margins, not the holding

The public reports include some character-reference material, including references to French’s work at Elliott’s on Congress.[1][4] That material may have mattered at sentencing, and it may have appeared in some form in the probation process. But it should not be asked to carry more weight than the public record allows.

In a case like this, employer support and character references are color unless the sentencing record shows exactly how the court relied on them. The better-supported explanation remains procedural: the prosecution’s plea agreement removed the dangerous-offense barrier, the probation department then recommended a probationary disposition, and the judge imposed standard probation.

The clean legal conclusion is narrower than the public outrage

There is a legitimate policy debate about how often prosecutors should dismiss dangerous-nature allegations in gun cases, what factual concessions should justify doing so, and how much transparency should accompany that kind of plea. This case may become part of that debate. But the currently available materials do not support a broader finding that Arizona sentencing law failed because a judge ignored a mandatory prison rule.

The July 2026 case remains a breaking matter. Charges may be amended, additional facts may emerge, and defense counsel’s account of the earlier plea is not yet available in the public materials reviewed here. For now, the narrower legal conclusion is clear enough: French avoided mandatory prison in the 2025 aggravated assault case because the dangerous-nature allegation was dropped in the plea process. After that, the case became a non-dangerous Class 3 felony for sentencing purposes, and probation was legally available.

References

1. Man charged with 18 assault counts after Downtown Tucson shooting injures 9, Tucson Sentinel
2. ARS 13-1204
3. Arizona Felony Sentencing Laws, Millar Law Defense Guide
4. 21-year-old man facing multiple charges after mass shooting in downtown Tucson, KVOA