A Los Angeles prosecutor who spent years on one of California’s most harrowing child-abuse cases accused Gov. Gavin Newsom of overriding a jury after the governor emptied the state’s death row.
Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Hatami was the lead prosecutor against the parents of eight-year-old Gabriel Fernandez in Palmdale.
Isauro Aguirre and Pearl Fernandez were convicted of starving and torturing the boy. A severe beating on May 22, 2013, left Gabriel brain dead, and he died two days later.
The case drew national attention and appeared in the 2020 Netflix documentary The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez.
Hatami said he personally told Gabriel’s brother and sister about Newsom’s order. Both testified against their parents as children, at ages eight and 10, and both are now young adults.
According to Hatami, the family is upset because no one from the governor’s office called them.
“Gabriel was a little boy who was tortured for eight months and the jury heard all of the testimony, including from his brother and sister, who were also so young at the time. The jury decided on capital punishment and the judge affirmed that, and that was the one closure that the family got,” Hatami said.
He added: “It’s mostly really disappointing that that one person made this a political decision to violate the will of the voters. It’s a pretty sad situation.”
Newsom’s order covers 548 inmates. Each one now faces life in prison without parole instead of execution.
The governor explained his reasoning in an open letter to Californians and announced the decision on Thursday, as he prepares to leave office after eight years.
The Democrat wrote that he has spent “nearly three decades of openly opposing” the death penalty.
He said the inmates caused “indescribable suffering” to victims and families. In the same passage, he said he has “concluded the state cannot morally kill them.”
“State-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system and diminishes each of us,” he wrote.
A provision of the state constitution could slow the order. A governor may commute a sentence alone when the inmate has one felony conviction.
A second felony conviction brings in the California Supreme Court, which must approve the clemency.
Newsom’s office says 382 of the 548 commutations, about 70 percent, fall into that second group.
Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman said the governor holds “constitutional power” to commute existing death sentences.
He said “that power does not extend to eliminating the death penalty.”
“Only the Legislature or the voters can do that. Californians have been asked on two separate ballot initiatives to abolish the death penalty and both times they have chosen to keep it for the most serious crimes,” Hochman said in his statement.
Newsom called the decision one of the toughest of his career. He acknowledged it will stir painful memories for victims’ families.
“As Governor, I alone bear responsibility for this decision and its impact, just as I alone would bear responsibility for each execution,” he wrote.
The governor froze executions with a moratorium in 2019. Voters rejected a 2016 ballot measure that would have repealed capital punishment.
Newsweek reported that Newsom had considered mass clemency for months and held more discussions with advisers after Christa Pike’s botched execution in Tennessee on September 30.
The commutations reach some of the state’s most infamous killers.
Charles Ng received his death sentence in 1999 for raping, torturing and murdering between 11 and 25 people in Calaveras County between 1983 and 1985.
Wayne Adam Ford, 64, a former Marine and long-haul trucker, abducted, strangled and dismembered four women in 1997 and 1998.
Cary Stayner, known as the Yosemite Park Killer, was convicted in 1999 of murdering four women near the national park. The California Supreme Court denied his appeal earlier this year.
Vincent Brothers, a former elementary school vice principal, shot his wife, Joanie, 39, in their Bakersfield home in July 2003.
He also killed their children, Marques, four, Lyndsey, two, and six-week-old Marshall, along with Joanie’s 70-year-old mother, Earnestine Harper.
A jury sentenced him to death in 2007. Prosecutors said he staged a fake burglary and flew to Ohio to build an alibi.
Richard Allen Davis, 72, remains on death row for the 1993 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas.
He took her from her bedroom at knifepoint, strangled her and buried her in a shallow grave.
Joseph Naso, 92, the “Alphabet killer,” was sentenced to death in November 2013 for the murders of four women: Roxene Roggasch, 18; Carmen Colon, 22; Pamela Parsons, 38; and Tracy Tafoya, 31.
Investigators found a “list of 10” at his Reno, Nevada, home. Naso allegedly told a fellow San Quentin inmate last year that it was a “top 10” of his most brutal killings.
Skylar Deleon, 47, was sentenced to death in 2009 for the 2004 murders of Thomas and Jackie Hawks. Deleon tied the couple to their yacht’s anchor and threw them overboard.
Lawyers said at trial that Deleon carried out the killings to pay for a sex change. California taxpayers began paying for Deleon’s surgery in April 2023.
The American Civil Liberties Union praised the order.
“These commutations reflect what justice demands: An end to a racist, error-prone, and inhumane punishment that has burdened California for far too long,” said executive director Anthony Romero.
The group is part of an ongoing lawsuit alleging the state’s death penalty statute is racially discriminatory and unconstitutional.
