Polly Klaas Convicted Murderer - Resentencing Hearing
After running for governor on a vow to uphold California voters’ support of the death penalty, Governor Gavin Newsom announced in March 2019, shortly after taking office, that he would grant reprieves for all death penalty murderers on California’s death row. He called the death penalty “ineffective, irreversible and immoral.”
Polly Klaas. (Photo: www.pollyklaas.org)
Newsom then signed an executive order putting a moratorium on the executions of the 737 inmates currently incarcerated in California’s death row.
This was a gut punch to Marc Klaas, the father of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, who was brutally raped and murdered in 1993 by Richard Allen Davis. Marc Klaas said it was even worse than just re-victimization, in an interview and video with the California Senate Republican Caucus. Klaas said Gov. Gavin Newsom invited Klaas and six other families invested in victims rights to the Capitol to discuss creating some kind of balance for crime victims. But, Klaas said one hour into the meeting, the governor duped all of them when he shockingly announced that he was going to declare a moratorium on the death penalty.
“I had no idea that was coming,” Klaas said. “That came out of nowhere.”
Klaas said the only reason he and the other families were in the meeting with Newsom “was so he could say ‘I told them before I made the announcement.’”
“Did I feel like I was being victimized again? Are you kidding me?” Klaas said. “After spending 25 years with the expectation that the sentence would finally be carried out on Polly’s killer, to have the governor kind of look me in the eye and say he was declaring a moratorium… I can’t be the one to execute 700 people.”
Flash forward to 2024: Convicted murderer Richard Allen Davis has been granted a resentencing hearing Friday April 5th.
Marc Klaas said in a Globe interview that Davis has legal representation from out of state attorneys. “Who is doing this?” he asked. Indeed, who is doing this and who is funding this defense?
Polly Klaas was having a slumber party in 1993 at her Petaluma, CA home, when a strange man holding a knife entered her bedroom, tied up all the girls and put pillow cases over their heads. The intruder then kidnapped Polly, raped her, killed her, and discarded her body off of the side of the freeway hidden under a piece of plywood. Her body was not found for two months.
Evidence at the crime scene led authorities to Richard Allen Davis. He eventually confessed to kidnapping and killing Polly, and he showed investigators where he buried her body.
So why is Davis getting a resentencing hearing this week?
Davis was tried and convicted of 10 felony counts including first-degree murder, burglary, robbery, kidnapping, and attempting to perform a lewd act.
At the sentencing portion of Davis’s trial, the jury recommended the death penalty, and he was sentenced to death. As Davis left the courtroom he flipped off the court with both middle fingers.
In the meantime, California’s Three Strikes Law was passed by the California Legislature and signed into law.
However, as the Sonoma County District Attorney’s office explains in their response to recall capital sentence pursuant to Penal Code 1172.75:
Senate Bill 483 was enacted in 2021 and became effective on January 1, 2022. (Stats. 2021 ch. 728 § 3 [SB 483].) It added Section 1172.75, which stated that sentencing enhancements imposed under Section 667.5(b) are now legally invalid and provided a procedure to identify and resentence individuals who are currently serving invalid sentences. (Pen. Code § 1172.75.) The defendant was identified by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation as being potentially eligible
for relief.
Senate Bill 483 was authored by Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) and removed sentence enhancements retroactively: As shown above in the table above, 2 of the 31 years in the defendant’s determinate sentence are based on now-invalid prior prison terms. On February 13, 2024, the defendant filed a motion to recall the entire judgment, including the death sentence, purportedly under the authority of Section 1172.75. The People herein oppose.
SB 483 was sponsored by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which also sponsored one of the worst imaginable anti-criminal justice bills last year, SB 94 by Sen. Dave Cortese (D-Santa Clara), which would allow an individual serving a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole due to special circumstance murder, to petition the court to recall the sentence and re-sentence to a lesser sentence if:
• the offense occurred before June 5, 1990
• they served at least 25 years in custody
SB 94 was shelved in 2023, but expect it to come back at some point. It was co-sponsored by Felony Murder Elimination Project, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Families United to End LWOP (FUEL), California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition, Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC), Center for Employment Opportunities, Drop LWOP Coalition and Families Against Mandatory Minimums.
None of these organizations ever shows remorse or care for the victims and their families. They are all anti-criminal justice, and seek to eliminate the felony murder rule from California law. Since California’s Three Strikes law was passed, Democrats and organizations such as these have diligently worked to undermine it, and successfully with passage of AB 109 (prison realignment), Proposition 47 and Proposition 57.
The Sonoma DA says Davis is not entitled to challenge his capital sentence under Section 1172.75.
Marc Klass explained that there are competing penal code sections at work here. The one Davis’s legal team is relying on, 1172.75, includes a specific disqualifier for inmates with prior convictions for a sexually violent offense. “According to him, the fact that Section 1172.75 is silent as to capital inmates must mean that capital sentences are eligible for recall and resentencing. Essentially, the defendant is describing the doctrine of expressiounius est exclusion alterius, meaning “[t]he expression of some things in a statute necessarily means the exclusion of other things not expressed.”
Richard Allen Davis and his lawyers are playing word games.
The Sonoma County District Attorney’s opposition to recall of Davis’s capital sentence pursuant to penal code section 1172.75 is correct that a recall of a capital sentence is not authorized under the section, and the court should deny his motion on April 5, 2024, in Department 29, County of Santa Clara Superior Court, Marc Klaas’ statement says.
“If my family can be subjected to the possible recall of capital sentence of a condemned murderer who, prior to murdering Polly, had multiple convictions for violence towards women and was diagnosed as a sexually sadistic psychopath, then any victim’s family who thought that justice was served in the courtroom is in for a shocking new reality.”
“If Polly’s killer is somehow able to prevail, this is the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of violent offenders will follow suit, so lock your doors, protect your children, and pray that your family does not fall prey to the violence and destruction that is sure to follow.”
Klaas said he did a public records request and discovered there are at least another 10,000 convicted felons who also will be able to petition the court for resentencing. “This will tie up District Attorneys and courts for a long time,” Klaas said.
Perhaps that is the purpose.
“How can they unravel a judge’s sentence,” Klaas asked. “Who do these people think they are? He’s [Davis] been given every legal consideration since he was arrested.”
“And he was turned down by the California Supreme Court.”
Klaas said Richard Allen Davis isn’t even in San Quentin any longer, and is at a mental facility in Stockton – awaiting resentencing.
After Issuing Death Sentence on CA’s Death Penalty,
Gov. Newsom Approves 3 more Prison Closures
Gov. Jerry Brown’s AB 109 was the first move by California Democrats to dismantle California’s criminal justice system.
“Newsom has approved three California prison closures but resists pressure to shutter more,” the Los Angeles Times headline reports… as if Gov. Newsom is so altruistic, he is restraining himself from closing more prisons – for the good of the people.
After running for governor on upholding voter’s support of the death penalty, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in March 2019, shortly after taking office, that he would grant reprieves for all death penalty murderers on California’s death row. He called the death penalty “ineffective, irreversible and immoral.” Newsom then signed an executive order putting a moratorium on the executions of the 737 inmates currently incarcerated in California’s death row.With Newsom’s announcement a political friend said, “Another 737 just went down.”
“We cannot advance the death penalty in an effort to soften the blow of what happens to these victims,” Newsom said. “If someone kills, we do not kill. We’re better than that.”
In 2016, California voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have repealed the death penalty, and instead voted to expedite the executions of the inmates currently sitting on death row. Newsom supported the initiative to repeal.
“With his announcement that he is granting sentencing reprieves for all death penalty eligible murderers on California’s death row, Governor Gavin Newsom has substituted his own opinion for the repeated decisions of the state’s voters,” Michael Rushford with the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation said in an interview.
While Gov. Newsom and the state’s Democrat lawmakers continue to dismantle the criminal justice system, top to bottom, poll after poll shows escalating crime is one of the top issues among Californians, which is why voters passed Proposition 66 in 2016, reaffirming the state’s death penalty, but also to speed up the appeals process.
In 2016 when Prop. 66 was passed, it was intended to be a remedy to the most heinous criminals sitting on death row for 30 years, with endless appeals delaying justice and costing taxpayers hundreds of millions – and to ensure no innocent person was executed. Opponents sued, taking the case to the California Supreme Court, which upheld voters’ decision, but watered down a part of the initiative. The Court stated that provisions requiring the state to speed up the death penalty appeals process were directive, rather than mandatory.
On the latest prison closures, the LA Times addresses the 2011 Supreme Court ruling that deemed overcrowding of prisons unconstitutional and ruled that prisons cannot exceed 137.5% of capacity. That same year, the state passed a law that relocated low-level offenders without prior serious or violent felonies to serve their time in a county jail instead of state prison.
What they don’t say is that Gov. Jerry Brown’s Assembly Bill 109, the “Prison Realignment” bill was the first move by California Democrats to dismantle California’s criminal justice system.
Assembly Bill 109, in 2011, was then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature legislation he sold as “prison realignment.” However, AB 109 only served to overwhelm county jails by moving “nonviolent” state offenders from prison. Gov. Brown could have built more prisons, but instead reduced the population by releasing or pushing inmates to local county jails, which are not designed to house someone past a year, and prevents law enforcement from taking low-level offenders in.
Adding insult to injury, Proposition 47, passed by misinformed voters in 2014, flagrantly titled “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act,” decriminalized drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, removing law enforcement’s ability to make an arrest in most circumstances, as well as removing judges’ ability to order drug rehabilitation programs rather than incarceration. And perhaps the most obvious aspect of Prop. 47 on display today raised the theft threshold to $950 per location, and bumped theft down to a misdemeanor from a felony.
Proposition 57, shamelessly titled “the Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act” passed in 2016, now allows nonviolent felons to qualify for early release, and parole boards can now only consider an inmate’s most recent charge, and not their entire history because of this proposition. Notably, both Prop. 47 and 57 were given their ballot titles by then-Attorney General Kamala Harris.
Crimes now considered “nonviolent” under Proposition 57 in California include:
- human trafficking of a child
- rape of an unconscious person or by intoxication
- drive by shooting at inhabited dwelling or vehicle
- assault with a firearm or deadly weapon
- assault on a police officer
- serial arson
- exploding a bomb to injure people
- solicitation to commit murder
- assault from a caregiver to a child under eight years old that could result in a coma or death
- felony domestic violence.
Ten years of increased drug and serial theft crimes, and a violent crime wave across California has taken its toll on the state’s residents and businesses. A proposed ballot initiative to amend Prop. 47 is currently collecting signatures for the November 2024 ballot. More than 500,000 California voters have already signed the petition to place the measure on the ballot. The campaign reports that a survey of likely California voters found that 70% of voters support the title and summary of the Homeless, Drug Addiction, Retail Theft Reduction Act. The overwhelming support was consistent across every demographic and geography including the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Furthermore, 89% of likely voters support amending Proposition 47 for stronger penalties for those engaged in repeated retail theft and trafficking hard drugs like fentanyl. The measure also includes incentives to complete drug and mental health treatment for people who are addicted to hard drugs.
Gov. Newsom’s push to close more prisons ahead of Californians’ opportunity to vote on Prop. 47 reforms make his agenda clear – he’s not interested in the safety and security of California’s residents – he’s prioritizing campaign funders and anti-criminal justice special interests.
The LA Times reports on more Democrat altruism:
Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena) and Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D-Alameda), both members of the Legislative Black Caucus whose priorities include prison reform, say they want more prisons to close. Bradford said that he supports a more “holistic vision” of public safety. “Investing in rehabilitation will pay dividends by reducing the revolving door of recidivism and will allow formerly incarcerated individuals to successfully re-integrate when they return home to their communities and families,” he told The Times in an email. While serving in her former role as chair of the Assembly’s budget subcommittee on public safety, Bonta was outspoken about the opportunity California had to close more prisons.
“We have an insurmountable budget deficit,” she said, referring to the state’s $73-billion budget shortfall estimated by the Legislative Analyst’s Office. Bonta said the deficit is forcing the legislature to look for cuts.
