Gavin Newsom wanted his death row giveaway to stay a number on a press release. One California prosecutor just put names and faces on it. Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer has released the cases of 49 killers from his county who stand to benefit from Newsom’s call for blanket clemency for every condemned prisoner in the state, and he is taking the fight to the California Supreme Court, Fox News reports.
“When we go to court, and we file on Monday, we’re going to make unequivocally clear to the Supreme Court that they are being asked by the governor to overturn the decisions they made affirming these death cases,” Spitzer said Thursday, standing alongside victims’ families and advocates. The state’s high court reviewed these cases and upheld the convictions and death sentences. Now Newsom wants those same justices to undo their own work.
“This is an extraordinary power, commutation,” Spitzer said. “It is to be used in extraordinary situations, not with the wave of a magic wand.”
Randy Steven Kraft, known as the “Scorecard Killer” and the “Freeway Killer,” was convicted of raping, torturing and murdering at least 16 young men over 11 years and is the suspect in 51 more deaths. Gerald Parker, the “Bedroom Basher,” killed five women and an unborn baby in the 1970s. Steven Dean Gordon was already a convicted child molester when he and an accomplice killed at least four women between 2013 and 2014.
Three of the killers murdered police officers. Kevin Dewayn Boyce shot off-duty Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Shayne York in the head during a 1997 hair salon robbery after spotting his badge and calling him a “pig.” Hung Thanh Mai shot California Highway Patrol Officer Don Joseph Burt during a 1996 traffic stop in Fullerton, finishing with what prosecutors called “a final execution-style shot to the head.” Maurice Gerald Steskal ambushed Orange County Sheriff’s Deputy Brad Riches in 1999, shooting him 30 times with an AK-47 rifle as he sat in his patrol car.
Then there are the “Yacht Killers,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Skylar Deleon, who tied an Arizona couple to an anchor and drowned them 55 miles off the coast to raise money for Deleon’s sex-change operation. According to Spitzer’s office, Deleon finally got that surgery behind bars, on the taxpayers’ dime. And John Joseph Famalaro, the “Cold Storage Killer,” abducted 23-year-old Denise Huber off the side of the road in 1991, beat her to death and kept her body in a freezer truck.
These are the people Newsom wants spared. All 548 of them statewide, even though California voters have twice refused to abolish the death penalty. Spitzer called it “mercy for the wolves…while inflicting the ultimate act of cruelty on the sheep.” Newsom’s office insists these inmates are not eligible for new parole board guidelines, but Spitzer and other critics warn that with death row off the table, these killers move closer to further leniency and even potential release.
This is a window into how Newsom governs. Voters said no, so he went around them, and the families who sat through trials and decades of appeals get told their closure is up for renegotiation. Spitzer is right that commutation is supposed to be weighed case by case. On Monday he asks the justices who upheld these sentences to do exactly that.
Source: foxnews.com