A California judge on Friday rejected a petition to overturn the death sentence against Richard Allen Davis, who killed 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993 after kidnapping her at knifepoint from her bedroom in a crime that shocked the nation.
Jurors found Davis guilty in 1996 of first-degree murder and of the “special circumstances” of kidnapping, burglary, theft and attempted lewd acts with a child. Davis was on parole at the time of the child’s kidnapping and murder and had an extensive kidnapping and assault record dating back to the 1970s. He was sentenced to death.
Davis’ attorneys argued in a February lawsuit that his death sentence should be vacated because of recent changes in California sentencing laws that eliminate some sentencing enhancements. They also noted California’s current moratorium on the death penalty. In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on executions, calling the death penalty “a failure” that has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or cannot afford expensive legal representation. change that policy.
The Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office said in a court filing that Davis’ attorneys’ arguments are “nonsensical” and that the laws they cite do not apply to Davis’ death sentence for Klaas’ murder.
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
Sonoma County Deputy District Attorney Sarah Brooks told the court Friday that Davis’ attorneys incorrectly cited a law enacted in 2022 that allows reassessment of the sentences of some people whose sentences were affected by special enhancements. She said their petition was a “further attack on the 1996 conviction and death sentence.”
Judge Benjamin Williams agreed and denied their request. He said prosecutors were trying to move away from the penalty phase of the trial rather than asking for Davis to be resentenced. Davis was not present during the hearing.
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Marc Klaas, Polly Klaas’ father, gasped when the judge announced his decision. Marc Klaas sat in the courtroom with a dozen supporters wearing buttons with Polly Klaas’s photo or shirts from the Klaas Kids Foundation. He said he was relieved and grateful to prosecutors and the judge.
“Our judge and our prosecutor were so decisive in their arguments and in their decision that this man actually has nowhere to go except, of course, to hell,” Marc Klaas told reporters after the hearing.
Davis kidnapped Klaas from her bedroom in Petaluma, 40 miles north of San Francisco, in October 1993 and strangled her to death. That night, she and two friends had a slumber party and her mother slept in a nearby room. Klaas’s disappearance prompted a national search by thousands of volunteers. Davis was arrested two months later and led police to the child’s body, which was found in a shallow grave 50 miles north of her home in Sonoma County.
The case was a major driving force behind California’s passage of a so-called “three strikes” law in 1994, which imposed longer sentences for repeat offenders. Lawmakers and voters approved the proposal.
California has not executed anyone since 2006, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor. And while voters narrowly approved a ballot measure in 2016 to speed up sentencing, not a single convicted inmate faced imminent execution.
Since the last execution in California, the death row population in the United States has grown to one in four convicted prisoners.
