SACRAMENTO
Two years after Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a moratorium on executions in California, he is preparing to appoint a state attorney general from a field of potential candidates that includes some of the state’s leading critics of the death penalty.
With current Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra up for Senate confirmation as President Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services, criminal justice reform activists have recommended for the job candidates including a district attorney who has stopped seeking the death penalty in murder cases and elected officials who have backed unsuccessful ballot measures to repeal capital punishment.
“I’m certain the governor will be looking for an attorney general who shares his opposition to the death penalty,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, executive director of Prosecutors Alliance of California, a group that opposes capital punishment. “I would hope that we would have an attorney general that’s seeking to move us toward abolit
Newsom expected to value death penalty opposition in a new California attorney general
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Dan Walters: Prosecutors feud over criminal sentencing laws
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In summary
California’s district attorneys are squabbling over whether California should continue to soften criminal penalties.
The starkest aspect to California’s evolution from a relatively conservative state into a blue bastion has been an evolving attitude toward crime and punishment.
In the 1980s and 1990s, California became a national leader in increasing penalties for crimes large and small, symbolized by a three-strikes-and-you’re-out law calling for life imprisonment of repeat offenders. Not surprisingly, despite construction of many new prisons, they became horrendously overcrowded with inmates.
However, as California made its almost 180-degree political turn to the left over the last couple of decades, attitudes about crime also evolved, culminating in legislative acts, ballot measures and administrative policies that repealed or softened the state’s sentencing laws. The number of felons locked up in state prisons has dropped by at least one-third in recent yea