CA death row victims’ families angered by Newsom commutations

They’ve lived through the worst horrors a family can endure, and they were promised their murdered loved ones would receive justice through an execution.

They suffered through years, if not decades, of appeals and hearings where they were forced to hear the stories of their loved ones’ violent deaths graphically retold again and again.

They watched courts — and then Gov. Gavin Newsom — suspend executions. The last one was carried out in 2006, before he was elected, despite California voters repeatedly reaffirming their support for the death penalty over the past 50 years.

And then on Thursday, they learned that Newsom, in one of his final acts as governor, had commuted the death sentences to life in prison for each of the 548 murderers on death row.

“These are not just numbers on a legal document,” said Sandy Friend, whose eight-year-old son was raped, tortured and murdered by a man facing a death sentence. “Each case has a family left behind. Each case has a story of a horrific, violent end to someone’s loved one. To wipe all of that away with one stroke of a pen, without looking at the details or looking into the eyes of the families, was completely unthinkable.” 

Newsom in an open letter about the commutations said the decision was among the most difficult of his career, “not because I doubt its necessity for our state but because I know its announcement may surface excruciating memories for victims’ families.”

The California Supreme Court will have to sign off on the commutations for around 400 of the prisoners who were convicted of multiple felonies. 

After Newsom’s announcement, CalMatters spoke with Friend and two others whose loved ones were victims of California killers sentenced to death.

Their reactions ranged from acceptance to fury.

A little boy’s mother feels ‘soul-hurting pain’

On May 16, 1996, eight-year-old Michael Lyons was walking home from his Yuba City elementary school when Robert Boyd Rhoades grabbed him and drove him to a secluded spot along the Feather River. 

Rhoades raped and tortured the boy for the next 10 hours. 

When detectives found his body, it was naked from the waist down, his Batman shirt pulled over his head. He’d been cut and stabbed 70 to 80 times, according to Friend, the boy’s mother. 

When Friend went to see his body, investigators would only let her see his face and one hand.

“I could see those scrape marks — those knife wounds — across his little face,” she wrote in an essay posted on the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation’s website. “That image will forever be the last image of his beautiful face I would ever see.”

In text messages Friday with CalMatters, Friend called Newsom’s decision a betrayal of everything she and other victims’ families have gone through. 

“I feel a deep, soul-hurting pain and an angry, screaming feeling inside,” she said. “We fought for justice, and now one man has swiped away these monsters’ true sentences in one moment, just like the monsters who took our loved ones’ voices and silenced our loved ones.”

Friend said she is worried that Rhoades may some day walk free, despite Newsom’s insistence that these murderers never will. 

Recent experience makes her believe those concerns are valid.

It was only last December that Rhoades, now 73, had his most recent effort to lower his sentence rejected. 

Rhoades tried to use a law Newsom signed in 2021 allowing inmates to petition to have certain sentences reduced, one of several laws the Legislature and California voters have passed over the years to increase opportunities for parole and early release. 

Michael’s family prevailed, but it was a painful experience. Once again, Friend and Michael’s loved ones had to go to court to relive the worst days of their lives. 

“He was a little boy. He was my son,” Friend said. “He had a voice, and that voice deserved to be heard, just as the voices of the hundreds of other victims and their loved ones deserved to be heard.”

A grieving sister bears governor no ill will

LaVerne Brison’s sister, Cynthia Annette Johnson, was one of the 14 victims of serial rapist and murderer Chester Dewayne Turner, who prowled south Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s.

Turner preyed on vulnerable women in the Figueroa Corridor, an area notorious for sex work, drug use and violent crime during the crack epidemics.

Detectives found the body of Johnson, 30, in February 1997 in nearby Green Meadows

Brison, a 75-year-old retired nurse who now lives in Georgia, said she has no hard feelings toward Newsom for his decision. She never expected Turner to be executed in her lifetime. 

“I don’t put the blame on (Newsom),” she said. “After all, he just inherited it. If he didn’t do anything, what was the next governor going to do?”

She has mixed feelings about the death penalty.

She knows how imperfect the justice system can be. Another man was initially charged with Johnson’s murder before being exonerated, according to the Los Angeles Times. Turner was eventually tied to Johnson’s murder through DNA evidence.

“I was a nurse. I saved lives. I don’t believe in killing,” Brison said. “But there are people who deserve it. And he’s one of them.”

When he was done with his victims, Turner tossed their bodies like trash. One of Turner’s victims was found in a portable toilet.

Brison said she knows of others in her situation who have spent their lives filled with grief, rage and frustration as they waited years hoping for their loved one’s killer to be executed. 

She’s not one of them.

Brison said she chooses to picture Turner, who’s now 60 and housed at California State Prison, Los Angeles County, rotting in a cell — when she thinks of him at all.

“I choose not to waste any time on him,” she said. “I don’t let him invade my thoughts. He’s not worth it. He really isn’t worth it.”

‘He would have made a spectacular father’

Phyllis Loya, a 78-year-old former attorney, is furious at Newsom for disrespecting her son’s memory and for adding more trauma on top of everything she and other victims’ families have endured.

“It was a deliberate political decision, and he could care less about what happens to victims,” she said. “He doesn’t want our input. He doesn’t want to hear our stories. He doesn’t want to consider us.” 

Her son, Larry Lasater, 36, an officer with the Pittsburg Police Department, got the call on April 23, 2005 to be on the lookout for two armed suspects who’d just robbed a bank branch inside a grocery store.

Officers spotted their stolen getaway car and tried to pull it over. It crashed. The two suspects got out and took off running down a trail. 

Lasater and other officers chased the suspects. One of them was hiding in the brush, armed with a 9mm Glock handgun. 

That suspect, 18-year-old Alexander Rashad Hamilton, fired four shots, two of which hit Lasater. Hamilton continued firing at other officers until the gun’s magazine was empty before he surrendered.

At his sentencing hearing, Hamilton said he was fine with being sentenced to death. He had no interest in hearing from Lasater’s family, telling the judge, “Let me get on my way,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Hamilton is now 39 and housed at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego.

Lasater left behind a wife who gave birth to their son 2 ½ months after his death.

Loya said her son lived his life in service to others and to his country. 

Her voice shook as she described how her son, a U.S. Marine reservist, had volunteered to lead the Marines in his former tank unit in Iraq shortly before his death.

“He was a wonderful son, and a brother, and a grandson, and he would have made a spectacular father,” she said.