Unchecked prosecutorial power, expanding parole — why crime victims need a voice

Capitol Weekly welcomes Opinions on California public policy or politics. Please read our guidelines for opinion pieces before submitting an Op-Ed. Submissions that do not adhere to our guidelines will not be considered for publication. 

OPINION — California law declares that “for every wrong there is a remedy.” That’s not true for crime victims, and the rule of law is suffering for it.

The Victims’ Bill of Rights (“Marsy’s Law”) entitles victims (a term that includes those directly harmed by crime as well as their families) “to be heard” at sentencing. But the law provides victims no right to appeal when lower courts impose unauthorized sentence reductions.   

Change is needed for everyone’s sake. Until victims can challenge the validity of sentences reduced at a prosecutor’s urging, injustices will recur, while important legal questions evade judicial resolution.

The case of Erik Chatman — sentenced to death in 1993 but now eligible for parole — illustrates the problem, one that regulations freshly promulgated by the Board of Parole Hearings (BPH) threaten to exacerbate.

Crime victims and others are challenging the validity of those regulations which, if fully implemented, would open new pathways to parole for prisoners sentenced — supposedly — to no possibility of parole. That prospect extends even to prisoners like Chatman whose initial death sentences are reduced to nominally no-parole sentences at the behest of prosecutors who issue misleading assurances that those prisoners will remain incarcerated “for the rest of their lives.”

Chatman owes his sentence reductions and parole eligibility to the efforts of Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. Rosen, who once called capital punishment a “vital prosecutorial option,” now opposes it on personal religious and public policy grounds. Accordingly, he has vowed to never seek the death penalty, and tried to “dismantle” (his word) capital punishment by undoing every death sentence previously secured by his office.

Prosecutors enjoy wide discretion, but abdicating case-by-case evaluation in favor of blanket edicts that displace state law with personal preferences constitutes a refusal to exercise discretion.

Worse still, the statute Rosen invoked to void death sentences across the board, properly construed, very likely doesn’t even apply to capital cases. Rosen first used that statute in his campaign to reduce all capital sentences to life without parole (LWOP), and later to further reduce Chatman’s sentence to life with the possibility of parole.

The family of Chatman’s murder victim actively opposed both actions, contending that Chatman deserves no leniency and that Rosen has no right to effectively veto a law he doesn’t like. They also raised the statutory construction argument: The statute authorizes only reductions of “terms of imprisonment” — a form of punishment that, unlike death, is imposed for defined periods usually expressed in years and months. Indeed, that distinction is reflected throughout our sentencing laws. Any counterarguments rely on a discredited method of statutory interpretation that places undue weight on extraneous material rather than the statute’s actual language.

When local judges reduced Chatman’s sentences anyway, the family asked the appellate courts to take up the matter. The appeals court in San Jose refused in June. The California Supreme Court declined review on Sept. 16.

The courts’ failure to address the family’s concerns is not an endorsement of Rosen’s behavior. At most, it means nonparty-victims are powerless to challenge it on appeal. This state of affairs not only compounds injustice in individual cases, but leaves no one to check prosecutorial excess more broadly.

Rosen is not the only —  or even the first — prosecutor to use the same statute to reduce death sentences. The recently unseated DAs of Los Angeles and Alameda counties did so as well, and on a much larger scale. Rogue DAs come and go, but elections can only mitigate, not timely correct, prosecutorial transgressions.

It’s bad enough when sentence reductions are made on unauthorized — yet unreviewable — grounds. Far graver consequences loom under BPH’s new regulations which, according to critics, “create an entirely new process to allow the most dangerous and most violent inmates out of our prison system, including individuals serving LWOP.” More prosecutor-driven conversions of death sentences to LWOP could trigger, in turn, a steady flow of regulation-driven conversions of LWOP sentences to parole-eligible sentences and, ultimately, more prisoners’ actual release.

While the fate of BPH’s regulations isn’t certain, amending the sentence-reduction statute to empower crime victims to appeal the imposition of unauthorized sentences would immediately cure a problem of some prosecutors’ making and help head off one of BPH’s.  

This much is certain: Without that amendment, important questions will continue to go unresolved, a condition that, alone or in combination with the new regulations, leaves the promise of Marsy’s Law — that criminals be “sufficiently punished so that the public safety is protected” — unfulfilled.

Ron Matthias, a retired prosecutor, provided expert testimony in the Superior Court concerning the sentence reductions discussed in this piece.