After Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that he will commute the death sentences of 548 prisoners on death row in California, an Orange County family joined several district attorneys across the state to condemn the decision and express their outrage.
The father of Sam Herr, who was murdered and dismembered by his neighbor in 2010, said his family is deeply hurt by Newsom’s decision.
Daniel Wozniak was convicted in 2015 of killing Herr, an Army veteran, and his friend Julie Kibuishi, more than five years after the murders. Wozniak, who had been deeply in debt, schemed to kill Herr and steal $50,000 that Herr had saved from his service in Afghanistan, according to prosecutors.
Steve Herr, Sam’s father, had to sit through a week-long murder trial after learning his son was shot to death in a theater on a military base in Orange County. Sam’s remains were found at the El Dorado Nature Center in Long Beach.
“We buried Sam at the National Cemetery in Riverside. And for 16 years, I have gone there every week and visited the grave,” the father said, expressing his anger at Newsom’s announcement.
“It affects me considerably. But I know I can speak for almost all the families who are affected by Newsom’s decree,” Herr said, adding that Newsom’s decision goes against Californians who voted in favor of the death penalty and voted against abolishing it. “We’re all reliving whatever we had gone through until the jury found him guilty, that the murderer was guilty and sentenced to death.”
California voters rejected previous proposals that sought to abolish the death penalty, most recently with Proposition 62 in 2016 and Proposition 34 in 2012.
Herr said he was not told about the governor’s plans to commute the sentences of 548 death row prisoners until he was contacted by a reporter.
“He could have had the decency to address the families one by one personally,” the grieving father said. “To me, it’s a very cowardly act. He could have done something besides that. He should never have done it, so he overruled everything.”
The Orange County District Attorney’s Office, which successfully prosecuted Wozniak for the murders, called it “an absolutely unconscionable decision by the governor.”
“This is a mercy for the wolves while inflicting maximum pain on the sheep,” Kimberly Edds with the district attorney’s office told NBC Los Angeles.
Some of the murder victims’ families do support the governor’s decision. They held a virtual news conference this week, urging the California Supreme Court to act quickly to approve Newsom’s request for the death row inmates who were convicted of more than one felony. State law requires a review of those cases before clemency can be granted.
