HUNTER: California governor lets serial killers, cop killers, child killers off hook
· Toronto Sun
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The men and women comprise a sickening constellation of evil.
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The horrors they inflicted may differ, but their commonality is that their crimes were so egregious, such an affront to decency that only death would set them and the public free.
On Thursday, California Governor Gavin Newsom threw that equation on its head. There would be no executions or death sentences in the Golden State after Newsom commuted the sentences of the 548 condemned men and women residing on death row.
Now, it’s life without parole, but Newsom hastened to add that the death penalty has not been kicked to the curb. Only the 500-plus judgments that put the scum of society in one locale.
Homicidal luminaries caught a big break
Getting the big break includes such homicidal luminaries as serial killer Randy Kraft and a name that’s chillingly familiar to Canadians, Charles Ng, along with child killer Richard Allen Davis.
But not everyone was delighted with the progressive push for leniency that came less than 24 hours after the mid-term elections.
Phyllis Loya, 78, told The California Post she was seething with “immense anger” after hearing the news. Her police officer son Larry Lasater was shot to death on April 23, 2005, while thwarting a supermarket heist. Alexander Rashad Hamilton was sentenced to die for the crime.
“It’s been very tough. It’s very emotional,” the senior said. “He wants to be president. So I was thinking he was testing the water, and the election made him go for it today. That was the only thing that held off his decision.”
Killed between 11 and 25 people
Serial killer Charles Ng was one of the beneficiaries of the progressive pol’s death penalty gambit. The 65-year-old serial killer and BDSM buddy Leonard Lake would snatch young women and keep them as sex slaves at a rural property southeast of Sacramento. The twisted twosome murdered between 11 and 25 people in the mid-1980s.
But as cops closed in, Ng went on the run, slipping over the border into Canada. Pinched for shoplifting in Calgary, a bruising extradition fight went down to the wire. Of course, if it had been 2020, no doubt that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would have taken a knee for Ng, throwing in a theatrical tear for good measure.
The thing is, we were different then but still Ng played the Canadian courts like a fiddle, delaying his extradition by six years. Unbelievably, in September 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the killer’s final appeal, allowing the Minister of Justice to send Ng back to California — without death penalty assurances.
Kraft may have killed 67
Cops and justice officials in Canada knew that Ng and his legal team would try to stop it. Within minutes of the decision, Ng was escorted from a Saskatchewan prison to an airfield and whisked back to the Golden State, escorted by the Mounties.
Besides Ng, there’s Scoreboard Killer Randy Kraft. Kraft was convicted in 1989 of the sex murders of 16 young men and boys between 1972 and 1983. Cops suspected his kill tally may have been as high as 67.
Toss in Richard Allen Davis, 72. Call him Mr. Three Strikes because his stomach-churning crimes inspired the legislation of the same name. He landed on death row for the rape and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, kidnapped at knifepoint from a 1993 slumber party.
As in the late 1960s, the desire for ultimate justice is ebbing. We know this will not last and that when the next flurry of outrageous butchery occurs, Californians will be demanding that the green room at San Quentin be reopened.
And get down to business.