'Give Gov. Gavin Newsom credit: He had the guts to act on his convictions and declare a moratorium on the death penalty in California,' writes LATimesSkelton .
Both measures failed narrowly, probably because they lacked support from the political top. As California’s attorney general, Harris even defended the death penalty in court.
But Harris took a hike when there were ballot initiatives to resentence every murderer on death row to life without the possibility of parole. Neither did she take a position on a rival measure to expedite the death penalty. It narrowly passed. Then-Lt. Gov. Newsom publicly supported both death penalty repeals. As for political leaders who stayed on the sidelines, he told me in 2015: “It frustrates me no end. I get the politics, but….”
“With one stroke of the governor’s pen, he has defied the will of the people,” state Senate Minority Leader Shannon Grove of Bakersfield charged. “For that I was called every foul name in the book,” Pat Brown wrote in his autobiography. “My family was booed in public. My political stock fell so low that there was talk of a recall. Then when I followed the law and the will of the people and allowed Chessman to be executed, the reaction was equally intense.”
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