The family of a 3-year-old who was raped and murdered is among those speaking out against the executive order issued by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, that pauses executions in the state indefinitely.
The state has a death penalty law that can only be prohibited by voters but Newsom said on March 13 that he will grant reprieves to anyone sentenced to death while he’s in office and the executive order suspended executions in the state until further notice.
Ruth Williams is the great-grandmother of Sophia Acosta, the little girl who was killed by Christopher Cheary after being raped and tortured.
Williams slammed Newsom for the decision. Cheary was on death row after being sentenced to death in January 2017 before the order was issued.
‘To see him die was my closure’: A Valley woman is devastated over Gov. Newsom’s order to stop executions. Her 3-year-old great-granddaughter was murdered, raped and tortured by a man now on death row. https://t.co/JkR3Veicnx
— ABC30 Fresno (@ABC30) March 14, 2019
She told ABC 7 that Cheary does not have the right to live after what he did to Sophie.
“That was the closure we had. To see him die was my closure and I would’ve walked to San Quentin,” she said. “I don’t care—I would’ve walked there to watch it.”
“How does he have the right to do this? We voted it. The people—we,” Williams said. “And then one man comes in and takes over, without asking our opinion?”
California activists tried abolishing the death penalty twice in recent years but both initiatives failed at the ballot box.
One was Proposition 62, which was opposed by 53.1 percent of voters in 2016. Voters that year also favored fast-tracking the appeals process, speeding up convicted killers’ time on death row, through approving Proposition 66.
President Donald Trump slammed the order on Wednesday, March 13, noting that Newsom was “defying voters.”
Because of a series of legal challenges to its method of lethal injection, California hasn’t executed a prisoner since 2006, but the state was trying to find a new execution protocol; the executive order also halted that effort.
According to the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation death row list (pdf), 737 inmates were slated to be executed prior to the executive order.
In addition to Cheary, Luis Bracamontes, an illegal alien who killed two law enforcement officers and said in court: “The only thing I [expletive] regret is I only killed two,” was among those awaiting execution who will now be housed on the taxpayer’s dime indefinitely.
Other families of victims have also spoken out against Newsom’s executive order, including Marc Klaas, whose daughter, Polly, was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by Richard Allen Davis in 1993.
“My daughter was a vibrant, 12-year-old child that was hosting a slumber party with two of her girlfriends in the home she shared with her mother in Petaluma,” Klaas told Fox 40.
“He had kidnapped, raped, and murdered her and then discarded her remains off the side of a freeway within about a two-hour time frame and felt absolutely no remorse for that at all.”
Davis being executed would be proper justice, the father said.
“The reality is, is that he doesn’t care about my situation. He’s more concerned with my daughter’s killer than justice for my daughter,” he said about Newsom.
Law enforcement officials across the state also spoke out against the order, including Tulare County District Attorney Tim Ward.
“The death penalty is a sentence requested in only the most egregious murders. Voters believe this, and have consistently shown their support at the polls,” he said. What message does this order send to families who lost a cherished family member, friend, or neighbor to our state’s worst killers? What of their grief, their days, months, and years in the courtroom waiting for justice, only to now have that ultimate justice ripped from them just as a killer ripped their lives apart?”
