California sued over policy that could free serial killers as Laci Peterson's friend sounds alarm
The family and friends of Laci Peterson are among the advocates of California murder victims opposing a new parole board policy that would open a path to recommend resentencing or clemency for serial killers, mass shooters and other convicts serving sentences of life without parole when it goes into effect later this year.
"We're talking about people that would have been qualified for the death penalty, OK? So they are the worst of the worst," said Anne Marie Schubert, a former Sacramento District Attorney who is now the president and CEO of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation (CJLF), a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that filed a lawsuit over the new policy.
"We are talking about cop killers. We're talking about baby killers. We had a family at our press conference of a 6-week-old that was tortured to death by her father over a weeklong period of time, all of which, what I understand, was on video — and so you talk about baby killers. We talk about mass shooters, there's a case out of Fresno that happened in the early '90s where a guy killed 10 people and he pled to life without parole. He would potentially be eligible."
Schubert singled out some high-profile prisoners serving life without parole:
Scott Peterson was convicted of killing his pregnant wife Laci and their unborn son after she vanished on Christmas Eve in 2002. Gang member David Hill fatally shot San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004 and wounded his partner. Darryl Lamar Collins was 24 when he killed two people in 1995 but was granted early release in 2017 thanks to changes in California's youthful offender parole law — only to kill his girlfriend Fatima Johnson less than a year later. They are among thousands who could potentially benefit from the new regulations, Schubert said.
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According to Schubert, the board exceeded its statutory authority by using the bureaucratic rulemaking process to create a resentencing and clemency review system for prisoners sentenced to life without parole, a plan that California's Office of Administrative Law approved on July 9.
"The main primary arguments deal with the fact that one, they don't have the legal authority to do this, that this is an administrative bureaucratic agency that's trying to rewrite the legislature, that they're trying to rewrite sentencing laws that came out of ballot initiatives," she said. "And really, this is a violation of what we call Marsy's Law, which is a constitutional provision that supports the finality of judgments for victims in California."
The CJLF, along with a coalition of victims' families and nonprofit groups, filed the lawsuit in an effort to stop the board's new policy before it goes into effect in October.
"The Board...has taken it upon itself to expand this recommendation authority into a full-blown system of reviews and hearings paralleling and resembling the system of parole hearings — the system that the people of California voted to curb in Marsy’s Law, Proposition 9 of 2008, due to the prolonged suffering it imposes on crime victims and their families," reads the petition, filed in Sacramento's Superior Court on July 15.
"The Board has extended this parallel system to include inmates convicted of first degree murder with special circumstances sentenced to life without parole, despite initiative statutes mandating life without parole as the minimum sentence for this crime and forbidding the striking of special circumstances."
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In addition to alleging the new regulations run contrary to California law, the petition raises concerns that the new process would force victims' families to repeatedly relive traumatic cases that were supposed to be over.
CJLF is working with the victims of some of California's most notorious murder cases, including Sharon Rocha, the mother of Laci Peterson.
"My daughter, Laci, was eight months pregnant when she and my unborn grandson, Conner, were murdered," Rocha said in a statement. "Scott Peterson was initially sentenced to death. After his death sentence was overturned, he was resentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Our family believed that sentence would finally bring some measure of certainty. Victims should not have to spend the rest of their lives wondering whether the person responsible will receive another opportunity for release. Justice demands finality."
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Peterson has maintained his innocence for decades and is still fighting his conviction in court. The California Supreme Court overturned his death sentence but has upheld his murder convictions. Prosecutors have opposed his claims and say the evidence against him is "overwhelming."
When Peterson's death sentence was reduced to life without parole in 2021, Laci's close friend Kim Juarez said she reluctantly accepted it because she believed it still meant he would never walk free.
"The only certainty that we had when Scott was put away was that he wasn't ever going to get out," she told Fox News Digital in a phone interview. "That's what, to me, is aggravating."
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Juarez described the last two decades as the repeated removal of scabs as Laci's friends and family have watched appeals, a resentencing and now another potential avenue that could eventually lead to Peterson's freedom.
"In a world where nothing is guaranteed and in something so big, we are guaranteed to never see Laci and Conner again. That's never going to happen," Juarez said. "The person that took her away — we just want to stick to what was handed down to him. This isn't about punishing him further. It's just about sticking to what was handed down to him."
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Juarez described trauma that extended well outside the courtroom and the legal process. Years after Peterson's conviction, she was pregnant with her own first child. But she found herself gripped by the fear that what happened to her friend could happen to her.
"I was about six months pregnant, and I said, 'If you decide that this isn't the life you want, don't kill me. Just let me go,'" she told her husband, a firefighter she'd met while handing out missing person flyers.
Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant on Christmas Eve in 2002, when she went missing from her Modesto home. Peterson was charged with killing her and their unborn son, Conner, when their bodies washed up months later in the San Francisco Bay.
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"There was life before this happened and there's life after this happened — this will always be a part of our lives," Juarez said. "Every Christmas, my family decorates a miniature Christmas tree for her."
But Juarez said Scott Peterson continues to cast a shadow over those close to Laci.
"She's never forgotten, and we want to make her the focus of all of these memories, but it's like he's the cloud that hangs over it," Juarez said. "The likelihood of him getting out, I don't know what the likelihood is, but the fact that it's on the table, that it is a possibility, is scary in itself."
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The dispute is also playing out against the backdrop of an unsuccessful effort in the California Legislature last year to expand parole eligibility for some younger inmates serving life without parole.
"Last year there was a bill, it was called SB 672, that... tried to achieve a similar goal of letting life without parole out, but they limited that to people under 26," Schubert said. "They could not get that bill through the legislature.... So in lieu of that, they backdoor it, and they go through a bureaucratic process that's not just under 26, it's everybody."
The board, in public filings, countered that there's nothing in existing state law that blocks it from doing so.
"Penal Code sections 1172.1 and 4801 do not exclude individuals sentenced to life without the possibility of parole from consideration by the Board for recommendation of commutation or resentencing," the board wrote in response to a concerned citizen who protested the new policy on inmates serving life without parole.
"Rather, these statutes grant the Board discretion to evaluate these cases and determine whether referral to the sentencing court or the Governor is appropriate. Had the Legislature intended to bar this population from consideration under either statute, it would have done so."
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Schubert, however, disagreed with that interpretation.
"The law says in California they can write regulations related to parole," she told Fox News Digital. "That's the word, 'parole.' Well, they don't get parole for life without parole."
Neither the parole board nor the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation responded to a request for comment.