Governor Newsom Commutes 548 Inmates on Death Row

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NO SECOND CHANCE:  For my money, ambitious, opportunistic guys get a bad rap, especially if they’re the sort — like Gavin Newsom, for example — to sport slicked-back hair like former Lakers coach Pat Riley. News alert to Gavin Newsom: You will never be Pat Riley. For my money — again with my money — Newsom is the only Californian with even the slightest chance of making it to the White House, as he let us all know last week, before we’d recovered from our midterm hangovers. Kamala? Please.

Last week, Newsom announced to the world that he would be commuting the death penalties of the 548 inmates still on San Quentin’s death row, which, thanks to Newsom, exists only as a memory of the “Good Old Days” but is no longer a reality.

For the record, Gavin has always been running for president. But that’s not reason enough to disqualify him. Yes, Newsom has always been an opportunist in heat, but along the way, he’s managed to move the needle of history and bend the arc of justice. How many of us can say that? As usual, last week, Newsom was at his best and worst. Clearly, he should have first notified the families of all the victims of said inmates. Not that this would have made anything better for anyone, but it’s what you’re supposed to do so people can’t say you didn’t. 

It’s not the first time, either. Back in 2019, when he was first elected governor, Newsom announced a moratorium on executions in California. For all the obvious reasons. Statistically, death penalty cases are filed more often against people of color; capital trials cost the state an insane amount of money. And what if it turns out they got the wrong guy? “Oops”? No one hardly gets executed anymore, since so many legal appeals are baked into the process to prevent “oops” from happening.

Just two years before Newsom declared the moratorium, state voters had decided two statewide initiatives about the death penalty: One was to abolish it outright; that lost. The other was to speed it up by reducing the time allowed for appeals. That one passed. It would later be eviscerated upon appeal.

Today, Santa Barbara has three people on death row. At the time of the moratorium, we had eight. One of them was not George Herbert “Spider” Wharton, who’d recently been un-sentenced to death because of ineffective assistance of legal counsel. Wharton was guilty as hell, having bludgeoned his girlfriend with a hammer. He then stuffed her body into an industrial-sized laundry soap drum. Wharton remained in the apartment until someone smelled the body. What his attorney failed to discover during the penalty phase of the trial was how, when Wharton was a child, his step-grandfather used to tie him up in a burlap bag and swing that bag on a rope over an open fire. That’s when the grandfather wasn’t sodomizing Wharton and the dog, too. Wharton was not released from custody; he was released into the general population. 

Another convicted murderer was Ryan Hoyt, who had popped nine rounds into an L.A. teenager whose older brother happened to owe the eponymously named drug dealer Jesse James Hollywood $1,200. It was not a case of ineffective counsel, but of utterly incompetent counsel. I covered that trial. I remember wanting to take an ax handle to Hoyt — a slack-jawed slouch of a human being whose father used his mother’s gut as a punching bag when she was pregnant with Hoyt — if only to get him to sit up straight. But then I also remember how powerfully shaken I felt when the death penalty was pronounced. I had no words. 

I’m sure there are genuinely innocent people on death row. But not from Santa Barbara. We got Theodore Wrest — who has since become Scarlet Holly — who stabbed two women to death in downtown Santa Barbara and then paralyzed a third by severing her spinal cord. In person, Wrest was a spook. He looked like he was wearing a stocking mask over his face. As a kid, he talked weird and was bullied; his father died when he was 2. There’s always some story. 

Then, there’s Conrad Zapien. He came to his sister’s “defense” by killing the woman his sister’s husband was stepping out with. Zapien stabbed her five times and shot her in the head three times. And in front of her two kids

In California, we couldn’t reactivate death row even if we wanted to. The pharmaceutical companies, it turns out, refuse to sell us the chemicals needed to make the killer cocktail. It’s an ethical thing. District Attorney John Savrnoch is alive to the irony; the same industry that killed hundreds of thousands by peddling prescription opiates is now squeamish about killing a handful of people. Savrnoch, by the way, grew up in Wisconsin, where capital punishment was banned in 1853. It’s written into the state constitution. 

It used to be political suicide for anyone seeking higher office to oppose the death penalty. Times have changed. Or maybe we have. Certainly, we no longer have the stomach for excruciatingly botched executions — two failed injections with the same Tennessee inmate, a woman — even using the most humane of methods. 

But Newsom is nothing if not shrewd. He knows how to surf the shifting currents. According to a recent Gallup poll, less than a majority of respondents — 49 percent — supported the death penalty. That’s the lowest since 1966. 

News alert to Gavin Newsom: You will never be president. News alert to the rest of us: He may be an opportunist, but he’s a principled one. You can, after all, be both. Sometimes, you have to be.