Victims’ Families Lash Out at Gavin Newsom After Mass Commutation of ‘Monsters’ on California’s Death Row

Relatives of California murder victims attacked Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday, a week after he decided to commute the death sentences of more than 500 convicted inmates.

The executive action, considered one of the most significant moves against capital punishment in recent history, angered crime victims who had already had to endure the excruciating pain of losing a loved one.

Faye Jenkins, whose daughter and son-in-law were tortured and murdered in their Riverside County home in 2008, said California’s electorate supports capital punishment and that Newsom should not have intervened.

“We voted for this,” Jenkins told reporters outside the Orange County district attorney’s office in Santa Ana.

“Who gives you this right to make the decision for all of us? You didn’t ask me, you didn’t ask my husband, you didn’t ask other families. Don’t impose your personal beliefs on any of us.”

Golden State voters were last asked about capital punishment in 2016 and subsequently rejected, by a relatively narrow margin, a measure to abolish the death penalty.

“People said they were animals. No, I love animals. They were monsters,” Jenkins said of the four Marines who killed her daughter.

“They tortured my daughter and made my (son-in-law) watch while they sexually assaulted her,” Jenkins said. “They stomped and beat him so badly that he even had shoe prints on his back – the impression that they had stomped on him so hard. Who does that? And these are people who (Newsom) think deserve a second chance?”

Steve Herr, the father of Samuel Eliezer “Sam” Herr, recalled the 203 hearings he attended before his neighbor Daniel Wozniak was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his son and friend of the victim, Juri “Julie” Kibuishi, in Orange County in 2010.

“He was sent to San Quentin’s death row to await execution and I thought that was the end of this horrible nightmare,” Herr said. “It didn’t have to be.”

Representatives for Newsom did not immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment from NBC News.

Newsom would need consent from the California Supreme Court for 382 of the 548 convicted inmates to all be removed from death row and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, or LWOP.

However, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer insisted there are procedural shortcuts around CNP that could put these dangerous killers back on the streets.

“Life without the possibility of parole is absolute nonsense,” Spitzer said. “I was attacked so much on social media this weekend and I responded to everyone I see saying, ‘Todd, you’re an alarmist. You’re lying about the law. You know these people can’t get out of jail.'”

“We practice law every day and people sentenced to life without parole are coming out of prison,” he said.

Although there are mechanisms for obtaining parole following a LWOP sentence, Stan Goldman, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said he could not think of an example of such an act of remembrance.

“From a practical standpoint, it’s not a real problem,” Goldman said Thursday. “If the past is a prelude to the future, it is very unlikely that any person, or large number of people, will be released, even if they were granted LWOP after being released from death row. »