The habitual criminal sentenced to death for the kidnap, rape and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993 went before a Sonoma County Judge last week arguing that state law requires that his sentence be overturned. John Woolfolk of the Mercury News reports that Richard Allen Davis was on parole for the earlier kidnapping of a woman, when he snuck into a little girl’s bedroom, tied up her sleepover friends and kidnapped Polly at knifepoint. Nearly two months later Davis was arrested for a parole violation and when confronted with evidence tying him to Polly’s disappearance, he led police to her body in a shallow grave. In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom granted a reprieve to Davis and 736 other condemned murderers to prevent their executions during his time in office. Then in 2021, as Katy Grimes of the California Globe reports , Governor Newsom signed a bill into law giving Davis a chance to overturn his death sentence.
That bill, SB 483 was authored by Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) and removed sentence enhancements retroactively. On top of his death sentence Davis had two one-year sentence enhancements for his prior felonies. Last year Governor Newsom signed another bill into law, SB 94 by Sen. Dave Cortese (D-Santa Clara), which qualifies murderers sentenced to life-without-possibility-of-parole (LWOP) for a re-sentencing hearing after serving 25 years of their sentence. The Sonoma County District Attorney does not believe that Davis has the right to challenge his death sentence. At best, the court can apply SB 483 to remove his two one-year enhancements, but because Davis was sentenced to death, and not LWOP, he does not qualify for SB 94 re-sentencing.
The Polly Klaas kidnapping was among the most widely publicized cases in the nation, and Davis’ arrest and trial were followed by millions. It is unlikely that he will succeed in getting his death sentence overturned, but the process that Governor Newsom and the Legislature have put in place will permit reduction of sentences for other murderers like him, who judges and juries showed compassion for by sentencing them to LWOP.
“It was a stab in the heart, Nancy,” Polly’s father and the Founder of the Klaas Foundation, Mark Klaas, told Nancy Grace during Thursday’s “Crime Stories” episode.
“What it did is it pulled everything right back up to the forefront. It brought the crime back to the forefront, the trial. You know I think about Polly all the time. I think about Polly every day but once this guy got on the death row I put him out of my mind and… and there have been very few reasons for me to think about him or to consider him at all over the course of the last 30 years.”
This is a slap in the face to the families and friends of murder victims who were led to believe that a killer sentenced to LWOP would never have the freedom that they so brutally took away from their loved ones.
The post Condemned Polly Klaas Killer Gets Resentencing Hearning appeared first on Crime & Consequences.
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John Fudenberg 