‘Victims of murder justice tour’ will try to pressure the governor into back down from his death-pen
"Victim's of murder justice tour" planned, prosecutors announced.
Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer on Thursday announced a “victims of murder justice tour” that he says will take place across the state in an attempt to pressure Gov. Gavin Newsom into re-considering his recently instituted moratorium on the death penalty.
Joined by other elected prosecutors, including Riverside County’s, as well as family members of murdered love ones, Spitzer denounced what he referred to as a “blanket, unlawful order” by the governor to block execution of the 737 prisoners on death row.
“Gov. Newsom took a knife and stabbed it in the heart of all these crime victims standing her today, and all the thousands of crime victims across the state,” Spitzer said during a news conference in Sacramento.
In announcing the moratorium last month, Newsom said the state’s capital-punishment system discriminates against the poor, racial minorities and the mentally ill. He noted that, based on studies, one out of 25 people on the state’s death row could be innocent, odds the governor said he couldn’t accept.
Spitzer urged the governor to meet with family members of victims killed by death row prisoners, and to treat the cases as individual clemency requests, rather than an over-arching executive order.
“He has made it easy on himself, because he hasn’t had to deal with the gravity of the specific cases,” Spitzer said.
To pressure elected officials, Spitzer said, prosecutors will be organizing crime victims from across the state, and will have them go into Assembly and Senate districts across California to “tell their stories.”
Spitzer also announced that the half-dozen prosecutors involved in the trial of Joseph DeAngelo, who authorities say is the serial killer and rapist known as the Golden State Killer, have unanimously agreed to continue pursuing the death penalty in the case, despite the governor’s moratorium.
“Certain crimes are just so brutal, so heinous,” said Bruce Harrington, brother of one of the suspected Golden State Killer victims from Orange County. “He is the poster child for the death penalty.”
Sandy Friend, the mother of 8-year-old murder victim Michael Lyons, left, and Raquel Herr, the mother of murder victim Sam Herr, comfort each other after a news conference to call on Gov. Gavin Newsom to reverse his moratorium on executions, during a news conference Thursday,
Among the prosectors who joined Spitzer in Sacramento was Riverside County District Attorney Michael Hestrin, who urged the governor to reconsider his moratorium in relation to one specific case: the 1980 rape and strangulation murder of 15-year-old Susan Jordan by Albert Greenwood Brown Jr., who has spent nearly 40 years awaiting execution. Hestrin said the governor owes it to Jordan’s family to examine the “monstrous” facts of her killing.
“They have suffered, and they deserve to be considered,” Hestrin said. “They have earned the right not to be ignored.”
Steve Herr, whose son Sam was killed in Orange County by Daniel Wozniak, said the governor’s decision took justice away from his son.
“You want anger, you want resentment?” Herr said. “You got it. He never took that into consideration, he just threw a blanket over it. A real leader would say, ‘Let’s look at this case-by-case and make a decision.’ He opened old wounds and created new ones as well.”
Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, who described the governor’s decision as “disgraceful,” also introduced several crime victims angered by the moratorium, including Phyllis Loya, whose son, a police officer, was murdered in 2005.
“I felt betrayed by Gov. Newsom,” Loya said. “I felt he was like a thief in the night who stole justice from us.”
Despite the hundreds of individuals on California’s death row at San Quentin State Prison, the state has not carried out an execution since 2006. But a move to hasten executions had begun to pick up steam in recent years, after state voters approved a measure to speed up capital punishment and defeated a competing measure to repeal the death penalty.
Phyllis Loya, whose son Larry Lasater, Jr., was killed on duty as a police officer, calls on Gov. Gavin Newsom to reverse his moratorium on executions. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
“I felt betrayed by Gov. Newsom,” Loya said. “I felt he was like a thief in the night who stole justice from us.”
Despite the hundreds of individuals on California’s death row at San Quentin State Prison, the state has not carried out an execution since 2006. But a move to hasten executions had begun to pick up steam in recent years, after state voters approved a measure to speed up capital punishment and defeated a competing measure to repeal the death penalty.