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

Ron Matthias and Dolores Carr have this op-ed in the San Jose Spotlight with the above title.

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.

California law has a serious problem with statutes that effectively enable prosecutors to nullify existing sentences when they simply disagree with the law under which the perpetrator was properly sentenced years before. An initiative is sorely needed to fix this and other related problems, building on the success of the effort to enact Proposition 36 this year.

Here is the bioblurb at the end of the article:

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.