Newsom Mainstreaming Condemned Murderers

California Governor Gavin Newsom plans to transfer 457 murderers, whose death sentences he postponed, out of San Quentin’s death row and into other prisons across the state. Hannah Wiley of the Los Angeles Times reports that the murderers will be released into the general population at two-dozen high-security prisons where they will have access to more rehabilitative programs and treatment services.  The  goal is to complete these transfers by this summer.  The effort to close down death row follows the Governor’s vision of transforming San Quentin into a Scandinavian-style campus where inmates would be allowed to wear their own clothes and cook their own food while attending classes and participating in job training programs. One wonders how safe it is going to be for the inmates serving time in the prisons where the state’s worst murderers are transferred.

One  of the murderers, Tiequon Cox killed most of the family of football star Kermit Alexander in 1984. Cox, an LA street gang member, intended to kill two drug dealers from a rival gang, but he arrived at the wrong house and murdered four innocent women and children. While at San Quentin, Cox attempted to murder another gang member and nearly escaped with two other murderers.  Another inmate awaiting transfer is Robert Boyd Rhoades, who was sentenced to death for the 1996 kidnap, rape and torture murder of Michael Lyons, an 8-year-old boy walking home from school.  At the time of the murder Rhoades was on parole for the 1993, sexual assault of a 4-year-old girl in Amador County.  In April 1985, Rhoades kidnapped, robbed, sexually assaulted and tortured a woman at knife point in Yuba County. Rhoades told the victim that he was taking her to the river bottoms in Marysville to kill her. This victim jumped from a moving car to save her own life. In April, 1984, Rhoades kidnapped, raped and murdered 18-year-old Julie Connell in Alameda County while she studied at a Pleasanton Park. Four days later, he robbed another woman in San Lorenzo, CA. Both of these killers should be isolated from other inmates and guards.

In the pursuit of a utopian vision, Governor Newsom and his supporters are putting some of the most ruthless and purely evil killers in the world in the general population of state prisons. What could possibly go wrong?