Let me tell you something. When a mom says she wants to talk to the manager, she usually means the grocery store ran out of the sale cereal. When Sharon Rocha says it, she means she’s hauling a whole state agency into court because they’re trying to let the man who murdered her eight-months-pregnant daughter and unborn grandson maybe walk free someday. And she’s right.
California’s parole board quietly approved a new policy last month that would open the door to resentencing hearings for inmates serving life without parole. We’re not talking about some kid who stole a car at nineteen and got swept up in a three-strikes law. We’re talking about people convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances. Serial killers. Mass shooters. Cop killers. The worst of the worst, as former Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert put it. The board’s own Office of Administrative Law signed off on it July 9. It goes into effect in October. And almost nobody noticed until the families stood up.
Here’s the part that should make every parent in this country sit up straight. The California Legislature tried to pass a bill last year, SB 672, that would have done something similar. It was limited to inmates under 26. They couldn’t get it through. The elected representatives of the people of California looked at it and said no. So the parole board just went around them. Bureaucrats decided they knew better than the legislature, better than the voters who passed Marsy’s Law in 2008, better than the families who were promised finality.
Paul Morse, White House photographer (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsI’ve read Marsy’s Law. I did my own research, like I do on everything they try to shove through while nobody’s looking. Proposition 9 was a constitutional amendment. The people of California voted for it. It says victims deserve finality. It says life without parole means life without parole. Not “life without parole until some agency decides to redefine the word without.”
Sharon Rocha’s statement will break your heart if you have one. “My daughter, Laci, was eight months pregnant when she and my unborn grandson, Conner, were murdered.” She believed the life-without-parole sentence meant certainty. She believed she could stop reliving it. Now some board nobody elected is telling her, actually, maybe not.
Laci’s friend Kim Juarez described the last twenty years as the repeated removal of scabs. She said when she was pregnant with her own first child, she was so afraid of what happened to Laci that she told her husband, “If you decide that this isn’t the life you want, don’t kill me. Just let me go.” That’s what living next to this kind of evil does to people. And Sacramento wants to reopen the wound on a schedule.
Schubert named names at the press conference. David Hill, who shot San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004. Darryl Lamar Collins, who killed two people, got early release in 2017 under a youthful offender law, and murdered his girlfriend Fatima Johnson less than a year later. That last one is your preview. They already let a killer out early once. He killed again. Now they want to do it on a conveyor belt.
Sacramento County, CA (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsThe Criminal Justice Legal Foundation filed the lawsuit July 15 in Sacramento Superior Court. The board’s defense, in public filings, is that nothing in state law explicitly stops them. Nothing in the law says I can’t let my four kids eat ice cream for dinner either. That doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t make it legal just because the statute didn’t anticipate someone this reckless.
The legislature said no. The voters said no in 2008. The parole board said yes anyway, in a back room, in a regulatory filing, hoping nobody would catch it until October. Sharon Rocha caught it. And every mother in this country should be standing next to her.