Santa Clara County Judges Line Up with DA on Death Sentence Reversal

By Ron Matthias and Dolores Carr

Since August, local judges have been nullifying murderers’ death sentences one by one. But there’s a problem: The law the judges have been relying on to reduce those death sentences doesn’t apply to death sentences. And that’s not the only problem.

It’s easy for judges to make mistakes when they’re hearing only one side of the story, and that’s what happened here. The reductions are coming at the insistence of Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, who has recently discovered he doesn’t like capital punishment. Unsurprisingly, the murderers feel the same way.

With the judges left in an echo chamber, it’s little wonder they’re not seeing the problems with Rosen’s plan. It didn’t have to be that way. They could have appointed a lawyer to argue the legal issues Rosen hoped to slide past the courts.

Appointing a lawyer is what the Supreme Court does in similar circumstances because, as former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once explained, without hearing competing arguments judges can’t be “satisfied that the relevant issues have been fully aired.” Our local judges didn’t see fit to follow that example.

Doing our best to fill the void, we, along with Tony LoBue and Maria Peterson, whose sister was murdered by Erik Chatman, tried to help the judges work through the problems. Family members of other victims, including those murdered by David Raley and Mark Crew, had earlier made similar efforts.

The first clue that the law doesn’t apply to death sentences comes in the statute’s own words limiting direct sentence reductions to existing “terms of imprisonment,” something death sentences most definitely are not.

The next clue appears in the law’s stated purpose — targeting cases in which “continued incarceration is no longer in the interest of justice.” Replacing death sentences with lifelong sentences obviously does nothing toward that end.

Astonishingly, the judges insist as long as a murderer stays confined he’ll pose the same minimal risk of danger to people outside the prison walls — whether he’s awaiting execution or serving out a life sentence.

Sound familiar? That’s the standard argument for abolishing the death penalty outright, and that was another clue: A statute concerned with reducing the length of time someone has previously been sentenced to prison obviously has no application to cases in which juries have determined that death is the appropriate punishment.

Californians have repeatedly been asked whether the death penalty should be available for the most heinous murder cases, and every time they answered “yes.” If they felt merely keeping the worst murderers confined sufficed to keep society safe, they would have said “no.” The voters’ judgment is not for the courts or Rosen to second guess.

The judges also failed to realize reducing murderers’ sentences without regard to the seriousness and consequences of their crimes makes a mockery of Marsy’s Law, which guarantees crime victims a constitutional right “to be heard.” That right is meaningless if victims’ accounts of the harm they’ve already suffered is deemed irrelevant and the only thing thought to matter is the murderer’s future dangerousness.

Alas, many victims’ families flagged these problems, but not one judge ever demanded Rosen respond. The result? Ten death verdicts in a row overturned.

One last case awaits a ruling on Dec. 6, that of Richard Farley, convicted of shooting 11 employees, seven of them fatally, at ESL Sunnyvale in 1988. Libby Allen, whose husband was among Farley’s victims, has hired prominent lawyer James McManis to press her concerns. Perhaps this time the courts will finally listen.

Ron Matthias worked as a deputy district attorney and later deputy attorney general over his 35-year career as a prosecutor. He was the statewide capital case coordinator in the California Attorney General’s Office from 2007 until he retired in 2019.

Dolores Carr was the district attorney of Santa Clara County from 2006 to 2010 and served as a judge on the Superior Court from 2000 to 2006 and again from 2011 to 2018. Earlier in her career she worked in private practice and was a deputy district attorney for 15 years

Originally published by the San José Spotlight. Reprinted with permission.