The family and friends of Laci Peterson are among the advocates of California murder victims opposing a new parole board policy that would open a path to recommend resentencing or clemency for serial killers, mass shooters and other convicts serving sentences of life without parole when it goes into effect later this year.
“We’re talking about people that would have been qualified for the death penalty, OK? So they are the worst of the worst,” said Anne Marie Schubert, a former Sacramento District Attorney who is now the president and CEO of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation (CJLF), a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that filed a lawsuit over the new policy.
“We are talking about cop killers. We’re talking about baby killers. We had a family at our press conference of a 6-week-old that was tortured to death by her father over a weeklong period of time, all of which, what I understand, was on video â and so you talk about baby killers. We talk about mass shooters, there’s a case out of Fresno that happened in the early ’90s where a guy killed 10 people and he pled to life without parole. He would potentially be eligible.”
Schubert singled out some high-profile prisoners serving life without parole:
Scott Peterson was convicted of killing his pregnant wife Laci and their unborn son after she vanished on Christmas Eve in 2002. Gang member David Hill fatally shot San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004 and wounded his partner. Darryl Lamar Collins was 24 when he killed two people in 1995 but was granted early release in 2017 thanks to changes in California’s youthful offender parole law â only to kill his girlfriend Fatima Johnson less than a year later. They are among thousands who could potentially benefit from the new regulations, Schubert said.
According to Schubert, the board exceeded its statutory authority by using the bureaucratic rulemaking process to create a resentencing and clemency review system for prisoners sentenced to life without parole, a plan that California’s Office of Administrative Law approved on July 9.
“The main primary arguments deal with the fact that one, they don’t have the legal authority to do this, that this is an administrative bureaucratic agency that’s trying to rewrite the legislature, that they’re trying to rewrite sentencing laws that came out of ballot initiatives,” she said. “And really, this is a violation of what we call Marsy’s Law, which is a constitutional provision that supports the finality of judgments for victims in California.”
The CJLF, along with a coalition of victims’ families and nonprofit groups, filed the lawsuit in an effort to stop the board’s new policy before it goes into effect in October.
“The Board…has taken it upon itself to expand this recommendation authority into a full-blown system of reviews and hearings paralleling and resembling the system of parole hearings â the system that the people of California voted to curb in Marsys Law, Proposition 9 of 2008, due to the prolonged suffering it imposes on and their families,” reads the petition, filed in Sacramento’s Superior Court on July 15.
“The Board has extended this parallel system to include inmates convicted of first degree murder with special circumstances sentenced to life without parole, despite initiative statutes mandating life without parole as the minimum sentence for this crime and forbidding the striking of special circumstances.”
In addition to alleging the new regulations run contrary to California law, the petition raises concerns that the new process would force victims’ families to repeatedly relive traumatic cases that were supposed to be over.
CJLF is working with the victims of some of California’
