Some math problems no professor would dare put on a blackboard. A Democratic governor moves to erase the death sentence of the man who raped, tortured and stabbed an eight-year-old boy more than 70 times. The boy's mother stands at a microphone wearing her son's photograph and calls the governor out. And the same party goes right on winning California's cities and its statehouse. That the Democrats continue to win these cities is a math problem for a professor to solve, because on the arithmetic of crime and punishment, it does not add up.
The news is this. On Thursday, November 5, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in an open letter to all Californians that he would commute every death sentence in the state, all 548 of them, to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the largest mass commutation in modern American history. Among the sentences he moved to wipe away is the one imposed on Robert Boyd Rhoades.
Here is who Rhoades is. On May 16, 1996, eight-year-old Michael Lyons was walking home from school in Yuba City when Rhoades, already a convicted child molester, grabbed him and drove him to a secluded spot along the Feather River. There he raped and tortured the boy for hours and stabbed him more than 70 times. Michael's body was found the next day in the brush along the riverbank.
A jury convicted Rhoades of first-degree murder with special circumstances, murder in the commission of forcible sodomy, murder in the commission of a lewd act on a child, and murder by torture, and in 1999 he was sentenced to death, a judgment the California Supreme Court affirmed in full in 2019. Michael was not even his only victim. DNA evidence later tied Rhoades to the 1984 rape and murder of 18-year-old Julie Connell, and an Alameda County jury handed him a second death sentence in 2007. And less than a year ago, after yet another courtroom fight forced on the family by a change in state law, a Sacramento judge reaffirmed the death sentence in Michael's case and told his family: "You deserve finality."
Finality lasted eleven months. Michael's mother, Sandy Friend, answered Newsom in a statement whose pain no summary can carry: "I feel a deep, soul-hurting pain and an angry, screaming feeling inside. We fought for justice, and now one man has swiped away these monsters' true sentences in one moment, just like the monsters who took our loved ones' voices and silenced our loved ones." She went on: "Governor Newsom commuted every death sentence in California, and no one contacted me first. Years and years of fighting, by me, by other people, and by families, and now it feels like it means absolutely nothing. He didn't even take the time to look at each case, or to sit down with the family members who are affected."
"Michael was not a number on a death row list," she said. "He was a little boy. He was my son. He had a voice, and that voice deserved to be heard." In a plea released with Crime Victims United and the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, Friend addressed the governor directly: "Governor Newsom, please look at Michael's face and say his name. Michael was only eight years old and weighed 80 pounds." And then the line that sums up thirty years of her life: "Michael didn't get mercy. He didn't get a second chance, and no one changed his sentence." She has gone to the Capitol and waited to say this to Newsom in person. She never got the meeting. Watch her say it here:
Newsom has given his reasons, and they deserve to be stated as he stated them. "I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California's values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us," he wrote. "These offenders will die in prison but not by our hand." He acknowledged that "California voters have voted to keep the death penalty on the books, and I respect that," and stressed that his action "does not repeal the death penalty." He admitted the decision was among the most difficult of his career because it may "surface excruciating memories for victims' families," and he said he refused to spare only some killers because sorting the "worst of the worst" would create two classes of murder victims.
One piece of fine print matters, and honesty requires it. For killers in Rhoades' position, convicted of felonies in more than one case, California's constitution does not let a governor commute the sentence alone: four justices of the state Supreme Court must first recommend it. Some 382 of the 548 cases sit in that group, and Newsom has asked the court to act by the end of the year, before he leaves office in January. The court has invited legal briefs, due November 24. So the fight Friend thought she won last December is not over; it has moved to the state's highest court, where the families were never asked to speak either. The state's district attorneys condemned the move within hours. "Justice requires case-by-case consideration, not one-size-fits-all decisions," said Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho, and the prosecutors' association noted that Newsom's own letter concedes the decision reopens families' wounds, yet those families got no chance to weigh in before it was made.
For ordinary Californians, this is what is actually at stake. Nobody on death row walks free under Newsom's order; life without parole is still a sentence to die in prison, and the governor's defenders are entitled to that point. But voters were asked directly about this policy in 2016 and answered directly: they rejected the measure that would have repealed the death penalty and approved the one meant to speed it up. Juries then imposed these sentences one case at a time, after hearing everything. What a commutation of all 548 at once tells every parent in the state is that a jury's verdict in the worst crime imaginable holds only until a governor decides otherwise, and Friend says out loud what many families now fear: that even life without parole may not be the end of it, since parole-board rules already leave room for a future governor to revisit such sentences, a warning law-enforcement unions put in writing to the governor and the court.
Newsom leaves office in January. The party he leads still runs Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Sacramento and the legislature that wrote the laws Rhoades used to drag Michael's family back into court. The mother of a murdered eight-year-old can fill a plaza, wear her son's face on her chest, and beg the state to say his name, and the political order in California does not move an inch. Somewhere there is a professor who can solve that math. It has not been solved yet.
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