A California prosecutor who says he is “disillusioned” with the death penalty is attempting something unprecedented: ensuring every death row case within his jurisdiction is reclassified to life in prison without parole.
Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen announced in 2020 that his office would no longer pursue the death penalty, and since then, 12 death row inmates have been resentenced.
Read also:
- Chiefs get good news and bring back key defensive piece on a discount
- Family of Boeing whistle blower sues company alleging harassment campaign led to suicide
- Silicon Valley Has Gone From ‘Think Different’ to ‘Yes, Sir’
- How Bryan Johnson, Who Wants to Live Forever, Sought Control via Confidentiality Agreements
- In Germany, ‘Orphaned’ by U.S., Shock Gives Way to Action
Now, only one remains.
On Friday, the Santa Clara County Superior Court heard the case of Richard Farley, a software technician who killed seven people and wounded four others at his former workplace in Sunnyvale, a city west of San Jose, in 1988.
The court held previous hearings last year in the county’s effort to resentence Farley, but additional family members of victims gave statements in opposition before a judge was set to rule.
“How is it in the best interest of justice to reduce this mass murderer’s sentence?” said Richard Townsley, who was shot three times by Farley and still has the bullet fragments in his body, in a letter read to the court. “No one should have to go through what we did, and it’s not right that Farley should live the rest of his life without the death penalty hanging over his head.”
Resentencing reviews by district attorneys are not uncommon, but they’re often controversial. Among them in California is the high-profile case of Erik and Lyle Menendez, who are seeking their freedom after they were previously sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in the 1989 deaths of their parents in their Beverly Hills home.
But California’s 592 death row inmates have already found a reprieve. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on executions. The last one was conducted there in 2006, before an ongoing nationwide shortage of lethal injection drugs.
But anti-death penalty advocates say executions could still resume under a future governor, and Newsom’s action does not prohibit local prosecutors from seeking death sentences in future trials.
The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Friday’s resentencing, but Rosen, who was first elected in 2010 in a nonpartisan race, has said the death penalty is “an antiquated, racially biased, error-prone system that deters nothing and costs us millions of public dollars and our integrity as a community that cherishes justice.”
“Judges and juries of the People should decide where an inmate dies,” Rosen said in a statement last year. “God should decide when.”
Of the 17 death row inmates eligible for resentencing in Santa Clara County, four of them declined to participate, according to the district attorney’s office. While the reasons are unclear, it’s not unheard of for death row inmates to refuse similar commutations.
Rosen, who does not align with the progressive prosecutor movement, had previously been a supporter of the death penalty, writing in an opinion piece in 2012 that it can be used “sparingly and responsibly.”
But in the wake of the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Rosen took two trips to Alabama’s Legacy Museum, which highlights the country’s history of slavery and lynchings, and found that his views on capital punishment were shifting.
His decision to undo death sentences, however, has opened up agonizing memories for others.
Elizabeth Williams Allen’s husband, Wayne “Buddy” Williams, was among those killed by Farley at ESL Inc., a high-tech defense firm. Allen, 22, and Williams, 23, were newlyweds, and both worked at ESL but had not known Farley, who by then had been fired. Prosecutors said Farley had been stalking a former female co-worker who rebuffed his advances. He was armed with multiple guns during his rampage.
Allen did not attend Farley’s initial sentencing, but for years had been waiting to learn when he would be executed so she could be a witness. Then, last year, she said, she got a letter from Rosen’s office about the resentencing and was stunned.
“I’ve never been so angry in my life,” said Allen, now 59.
While Allen said she can understand a prosecutor choosing to re-evaluate a case that may have been undermined by misconduct and racial bias, she insists Farley’s is not one.
“He’s white and his victims were white,” Allen said. “You cannot treat every crime like they’re the same. When you take this singular case of Richard Farley — what he planned to do, what he decided to do — this is what the death penalty was created for. And he has shown no remorse.”
Allen was able to track down other family members of victims to inform them of the resentencing, and a San Jose lawyer, Jim McManis, is helping to represent them.
McManis said California law allows for a defendant’s “term of imprisonment” to be modified, but disagrees that should apply to death row inmates because their sentences were not “imprisonment” but death.
“It’s not a question of whether you’re for or against the death penalty,” McManis said. “It’s a question of the rule of law and applying the statute to it.”
Farley’s public defender declined to comment about the resentencing, but in a court filing said others have described the now-76-year-old as an “ideal inmate” and that his previously undiagnosed autism and dysfunctional childhood had impaired his understanding of proper societal behavior as an adult.
While his autism does not excuse his crimes, the filing said, “explaining the function of the brain and how this relates to autistic thinking would have been a significant part of mitigation, which would have helped contextualize his crimes and extenuated the need for a death sentence. Unfortunately, this evidence was not presented to the jury.”
“Absent a death sentence, Mr. Farley will spend the remainder of his life as he has for three decades — quietly, posing no danger to fellow prisoners, staff, or the people of California,” the filing added.
Allen, however, worries what signal Rosen’s request may send to both criminals and other district attorneys.
“This has nothing to do with justice,” she said. “This has to do with an overreaching, unnecessary grab on his own whim.”
Elisabeth Semel, a professor and the founding director of the Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic, said no matter what someone thinks of the death penalty, there remains no evidence that executions advance public safety.
A 2011 study published by the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review found that the state’s death row prisoners cost $184 million more per year than those sentenced to life in prison without parole.
The cost of capital trials, public legal representation and enhanced death row security is costing taxpayers “hundreds of millions of dollars in a haphazard, discriminatory, and unreliable effort to grease the machinery — money that is desperately needed elsewhere,” Semel said in an email.
Former district attorneys in Alameda and Los Angeles counties have also attempted to resentence a large number of defendants, Semel said, but not at the degree of every death-sentenced defendant like Rosen.
The district attorney, she added, “has been forthright about what prompted him to act. As he writes and has stated elsewhere publicly, the death penalty system is ‘irredeemably broken.’”
Erik Ortiz is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital focusing on racial injustice and social inequality.
