FILE: A view of the California State Prison at San Quentin May 15, 2009. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
As Gavin Newsom’s time as California governor winds down, he issued one of the most consequential and controversial decisions of his political career: On Thursday, he used his constitutional authority to commute the death sentences of California’s over 500 death row prisoners. Instead, they will all serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us,” Newsom wrote in a letter to Californians. He called the decision “among the most difficult of my career” due to the pain he knew it would cause some families of victims.
(Plus he not longer cares about their votes anymore! Grumpy)
California hasn’t executed a death row prisoner since 2006. When Newsom took office as governor in 2019, he issued a formal moratorium on the death penalty. With over 500 men and women condemned to death, Newsom said California had the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere.
“We can now let these offenders die in obscurity while we forever remember and honor their victims,” Newsom wrote.
(What a typical example of his kind of crock of shit. Especially since the dead don’t get a say but they always get the death penalty!)
Some of California’s most notorious killers have lived on death row for decades. Here are some of the most infamous names that have had their sentences commuted to life.
Celeste Carrington
Although nowhere near as well-known as the other names on the death row inmate list, Celeste Carrington was one of the only condemned women in the state.
She grew up in Philadelphia where, according to her defense attorneys, she was raped and impregnated by her father when she was 14. Carrington came to Southern California to attend community college and eventually found work in the Bay Area as a janitor.
In 1991, she was fired for allegedly stealing checks, but she was mistakenly allowed to keep the keys of her former clients.
(Don’t you just hate it when that happens! Grumpy)
She used them to enter a shoe factory in San Carlos, a real estate office in Palo Alto and a pediatrician’s office, killing a janitor and a property manager and wounding a doctor while robbing the offices. According to prosecutors, the victims did not resist, and Carrington shot them execution-style.
At the time her death penalty sentence was upheld in 2009, she was one of 15 women on death row in California. She is now 64 and incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.
David Carpenter
Better known as the “Trailside Killer,” David Carpenter was born in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco in 1930. By the time he was a teenager, he was already committing sexual assaults, and in 1960 he nearly killed an acquaintance and got his first major prison sentence. But by 1970, he was back on the streets, and his crime spree would only escalate.
It’s believed he killed his first person in 1979, when he began hiding along trails in Marin and Santa Cruz counties to wait for passing hikers. Multiple murders on Mount Tamalpais caused panic to spread through the Bay Area, and law enforcement warned women not to hike alone.
Multiple witnesses who saw Carpenter in the area of the crimes, including one man who survived being shot by Carpenter, helped police identify him. Carpenter was arrested In 1981 and convicted of eight murders, although he is suspected of several more. He is currently 96 years old and incarcerated at the California Health Care Facility near Stockton.
(Another stellar soul! I cannot imagine on how much money has been spent to keep him & his buddies alive. Grumpy)
Richard Allen Davis
Few crimes have affected Californians like the kidnapping and murder of Polly Klaas. In October 1993, 12-year-old Polly and her friends were having a sleepover at her home in Petaluma when Davis broke into the home and kidnapped Polly. Despite the fact he was stopped for a call that he was trespassing that night, he was not arrested or linked to the kidnapping. (Great Job Officer!!)
In this 1993 file photo, 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma, Calif., is shown.
AP
Over a month later, the property owner who called in the suspected trespassing found some of Polly’s things and informed police. Davis was finally taken into custody, where he confessed and told detectives Polly was buried in a shallow grave off Highway 101 near Cloverdale.
Due in part to the case, support in California grew for a three strikes law — Davis had a history of assaults, burglaries and kidnapping — which was passed in 1994. Davis is now 72 years old.
Newsom cited conversations with Polly’s two sisters as influential in his decision to grant clemency all of the state’s death row inmates. Polly’s father, Marc Klaas, however, has come out against the governor’s stance against the death penalty. (Gee I wonder why !?! But good for you Dad!)
Randy Kraft
Randy Kraft was born in Long Beach in 1945. He joined the Air Force after college, but he was discharged for “medical” reasons after he disclosed to officers that he was gay. His targets were often in the military, and he used alcohol and tranquilizers to subdue them before killing them.
In 1983, Kraft was pulled over by a CHP officer on Interstate 5 who thought he was drunk. In the passenger seat, Kraft’s last victim was slumped over, dead. In his car, detectives found a list of over 60 coded names and places, giving him the moniker the “Scorecard Killer.” Although he was found guilty of 16 murders, some believe those 60 names refer to more victims.
Handout photo provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation of Randy Steven Kraft, left in 1983, right in June 2007.
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via Getty Images
Unsolved crimes are still being tied to Kraft. Over the last few years, two more likely victims of Kraft were identified.
Kraft, now 81, is incarcerated at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. (Gee he got to retire in San Diego and on the tax payers dime too!)
Joseph Naso
Joseph Naso was born and raised in New York, but he settled in the Bay Area after serving in the Air Force. From the 1970s until he was caught in 1994, Naso preyed on women in the Bay Area and beyond. Some women were lured by his job as a freelance photographer. Although he was arrested frequently for petty crimes like theft, police did not suspect he was the serial killer operating in the Bay Area.
Parole officers checking on him in 2010 found a diary in his home that documented the sexual assaults of nearly a dozen women. He was found guilty of killing at least four women, but it’s believed he killed at least 10. He’s also a person of interest in the infamous Rochester alphabet murders due to his ties to the area.
FILE: Joseph Naso listens to Chief Deputy Public Defender David Brown during his arraignment in which murder charges were read against him in Marin County Superior Court in San Rafael, Calif. on April 13, 2011.
MediaNews Group/Marin Independen/MediaNews Group via Getty Images
Naso is 92 and incarcerated at the California Health Care Facility. (Another winner of California’s generosity for the scum of the earth!)
Charles Ng
One half of the serial killer pair Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, Ng was born in Hong Kong and moved to the Bay Area on a student visa to attend Notre Dame de Namur University. He flunked out of school and faked an ID to join the Marines, but he went on the run after allegedly stealing weapons from a military base.
(Yeah the Marines are a little bit strange about that happening on their watch.)
In the early 1980s, he crossed paths with Lake, a violent and paranoid survivalist who had a cabin in Wilseyville. Together, the pair began kidnapping people they met via classified ads and dumping their remains in a mass grave on the property. The pair were busted in 1985 when Ng got caught stealing from a South San Francisco hardware store. Lake swallowed a cyanide pill and died before he could face trial.
(Good for him and for the California Taxpayers!)
Ng was found guilty of 11 murders, but it’s believed there may be more victims. Even recently, remains are still being identified from the Wilseyville mass grave. Ng, 65, is incarcerated at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.
Nick Ut/Associated Press 1999
Cary Stayner
There are few stories in American crime history as strange as Cary Stayner’s. When Stayner was a boy, his 7-year-old brother Steven was kidnapped on the walk home from school in Merced.
For eight years, Steven was held captive by a hotel clerk named Kenneth Parnell, but when Parnell kidnapped another 5-year-old boy, Steven resolved to escape. On Valentine’s Day 1980, he took the boy and hitchhiked to a Ukiah police station, saving both himself and the boy. Cary was 17 when Steven became a national hero.
Surrounded by TV cameras, Steven Stayner, right foreground, and father Delbert Stayner are shown walking toward their Merced County, Calif., home in this March 2, 1980 file photo, after Steven was reunited with his family following a 7-year kidnap ordeal. A third brother, Cary Stayner, is seen in a ball cap in the background.
AP Photo/The Modesto Bee, Ted Benson, File
As an adult, Cary Stayner found work doing odd jobs, including working as a handyman in the Yosemite area.
In 1999, pretending he’d been called for a maintenance job at the Cedar Lodge, he got into a guest room and killed three tourists. A few months later, he killed a naturalist who was living in a cabin. A witness told police about a distinctive car they’d seen nearby that day, and police traced it to the Cedar Lodge handyman.
Stayner is incarcerated at Pelican Bay State Prison and is now 65.
