Between 1978 and 2011, 15 men in Santa Clara County were sentenced to death for murders with special circumstances like kidnapping, torture and rape. Mass murderer Richard Farley, who killed seven and wounded four others in 1988 at ESL Inc. in Sunnyvale, was one of them.
In 2024 District Attorney Jeff Rosen decided he had “lost faith” in the death penalty and hatched a plan to have their sentences reduced to life without possibility of parole. He claimed concern about “implicit bias and structural racism,” notwithstanding more than half of these murderers are White, and that “fairness” and “justice” drove his change of heart.
After sending a form letter to some of the murdered victims’ family members advising them of his plan, Rosen filed identical boilerplate motions attacking the death penalty, vowing to “dismantle” it. The reviewing judge was rightly unimpressed, and alerted Rosen that his newfound antipathy was not a legal basis for reducing death sentences. The court noted that Rosen’s motions were “silent as to the criteria” written in a new law allowing certain sentence reductions. Rosen re-tooled his pitch.
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Conveniently, he ignored that the statute, on its face, doesn’t apply to death sentences. Not surprisingly, the murderers went along. At the hearings, family members who tearfully objected were listened to politely, but with the district attorney and defense arm-in-arm, the judges fell in line. Every death-row inmate’s sentence was reduced.
Richard Farley was the final case. Surprisingly, the judge denied Rosen’s request. What happened?
Could it have been that it was the first case where an attorney appeared for the victims’ families and survivors and presented legal arguments that the district attorney had conveniently ignored? Attorney James McManis successfully argued that Rosen’s motion should be rejected. Farley’s death sentence remains intact.
Rosen could have appealed the court’s ruling. He hasn’t, and the time has now expired. Why would Rosen, who once so fervently sought Farley’s sentence reduction, just walk away?
Several possibilities come to mind: if the appellate courts concluded that the statute Rosen used doesn’t apply to capital cases, then none of the other 11 murderers should have had their sentences reduced. That humiliation could be a risk he was unwilling to take, especially facing reelection and given his aspirations for higher office.
Perhaps it was the more than 100 people in court or watching remotely, including many law enforcement officers, seeing the county’s chief law enforcement officer going to bat for a mass murderer. Or the television cameras interviewing the survivors of Farley’s massacre who talked about its horror and how they still suffer 36 years later. No wonder Rosen had no comment for the media after his defeat.
“Fairness” and “justice” never remotely required that Farley’s sentence be reduced. But if it did, Rosen’s decision not to appeal would be unconscionable.
The death penalty remains the law in California, despite a moratorium on executions imposed in 2019. In fact, voters rejected referenda to abolish the death penalty in 2012 and 2016. San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe recently announced his office would seek the death penalty against the man who allegedly murdered seven and critically wounded one person in Half Moon Bay in 2023.
District attorneys take an oath to follow the law. Dutiful prosecutors don’t allow their political, religious or other personal views to influence their professional judgment. Rosen abused his oath of office by reaching back 40 years to steal justice from the victims of the most terrible murders in the county. Santa Clara County residents deserve better than a district attorney who cares more about murderers than victims of crime.
Dolores Carr is a retired Superior Court judge and served as Santa Clara County district attorney from 2006-10.