California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s commutation of 548 death row inmates has sparked blowback from district attorneys across the state — and the massive clemency order by the outgoing governor may be easier said than done.
Prosecutors across the state were “furious over the decision and began highlighting murder victims,” the California Post reported Thursday, citing criminals ranging from child murderers to a notorious serial killer.
The mass commutation from death to life sentences has been reported as the largest in U.S. history.
One district attorney cited the brutal rape and homicide cases of Rachel Newhouse and Aundria Crawford, college students who were killed in the late 1990s by Rex Allan Krebs, a paroled serial rapist and killer who preyed on women in central California.
In 1998, Krebs abducted and bound college student Newhouse in an abandoned cabin and raped and sodomized he before taking her life.
Crawford, 20, and another college student, disappeared from her apartment in 1999, and she became another one of Krebs’ rape victims, dying by strangulation.
His rape homicides were so brutal he became the subject of a true crime book Dead and Buried: A True Story of Serial Rape and Murder.
The district attorney also highlighted the well-deserved death sentence of Michael Whisenhunt in 1996. A jury convicted him of torturing 20-month-old toddler Kesha Gurke, the daughter of his girlfriend, and beating her so hard her intestines were severed, the Post reported.
“Governor Newsom just told the families of Rachel Newhouse, Aundria Crawford, Kesha Gurke, and every other innocent victim of California’s 548 condemned killers that the killers’ lives matter more,” Dan Dow, the district attorney for San Luis Obispo County, said in a statement posted on Instagram.
He continued, “Juries chose justice case by case, voters chose it five times, and one outgoing governor tried to erase it all with a pen,” the statement continued.
However, there is a legal hurdle the term-limited Democratic governor’s clemency order has to overcome.
The state’s Constitution bars commutations of anyone twice convicted of a felony unless the California Supreme Court recommends it with four justices concurring. A whopping 382 of the 548 death row inmates qualify for that exception, according to the San Luis Obispo District Attorney’s Office.
Ostensibly, if each case were given a thorough review, the state Supreme Court staff could be buried in paperwork for some time to come.
Newsom acknowledged the multiple-conviction hurdle.
“While I am confident this act of categorical clemency is consistent with California law, I acknowledge that my decision to exercise my constitutional clemency authority requires the Justices to participate in a weighty decision they did not choose to take up and with which they may personally disagree,” Newsom wrote in a lengthy “open” letter to the public.
The governor’s office asked supreme court justices to review each and every case on its own merits and to hear from family members of the victims, according to the Post.
“Clemency is an extraordinary power intended to provide relief when the facts and circumstances of an individual case justify it,” said Greg Totten, CEO of California District Attorneys Association, in a statement quoted by the California outlet.
He continued, “It was never intended to serve as a substitute for the legislative process or to allow one elected official to effectively nullify hundreds of jury verdicts simply because he disagrees with the law. The Governor has turned an extraordinary constitutional safeguard into a sweeping instrument of personal policy.”
The Post reached out to the press office for the state supreme court which told the outlet it had no comment on the matter.
Anne Marie Schubert, a former district attorney who now leads the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, told the California tabloid that her group will legally challenge the governor’s order.
“There’s going to be a number of arguments that we will make, but at the end of the day, we are doing this on behalf of crime victims and the rule of law,” she said.
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
