The family and friends of Laci Peterson are among the advocates of California murder victims opposing a new parole board policy that would open a path to recommend resentencing or clemency for serial killers, mass shooters and other convicts serving sentences of life without parole when it goes into effect later this year.
The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, along with a coalition of victims’ families and nonprofit groups, filed the lawsuit in an effort to stop the board’s new policy before it goes into effect in October.
Anne Marie Schubert, a former Sacramento District Attorney who is now the president and CEO of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation (CJLF), is leading the challenge.
California’s Office of Administrative Law approved the policy on July 9.
“We’re talking about people that would have been qualified for the death penalty, OK? So they are the worst of the worst,” said Schubert.
Schubert detailed the types of offenders who could be affected.
“We are talking about cop killers. We’re talking about baby killers. We had a family at our press conference of a six-week-old that was tortured to death by her father over a week-long period of time, all of which, what I understand, was on video — and so you talk about baby killers.
We talk about mass shooters, there’s a case out of Fresno that happened in the early ’90s where a guy killed 10 people and he pled to life without parole.
He would potentially be eligible,” Schubert continued.
Scott Peterson was convicted of killing his pregnant wife Laci and their unborn son after she vanished on Christmas Eve in 2002.
Gang member David Hill fatally shot San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004 and wounded his partner.
Darryl Lamar Collins was 24 when he killed two people in 1995 but was granted early release in 2017 thanks to changes in California’s youthful offender parole law — only to kill his girlfriend Fatima Johnson less than a year later.
They are among thousands who could potentially benefit from the new regulations, Schubert said.
“The main primary arguments deal with the fact that one, they don’t have the legal authority to do this, that this is an administrative bureaucratic agency that’s trying to rewrite the legislature, that they’re trying to rewrite sentencing laws that came out of ballot initiatives,” Schubert said.
The lawsuit contends the board violated victims’ rights.
“The Board…has taken it upon itself to expand this recommendation authority into a full-blown system of reviews and hearings paralleling and resembling the system of parole hearings — the system that the people of California voted to curb in Marsy’s Law, Proposition 9 of 2008, due to the prolonged suffering it imposes on crime victims and their families,” reads the petition filed in Sacramento’s Superior Court on July 15.
In addition to alleging the new regulations run contrary to California law, the petition raises concerns that the new process would force victims’ families to repeatedly relive traumatic cases that were supposed to be over.
Sharon Rocha spoke out against the policy.
“My daughter, Laci, was eight months pregnant when she and my unborn grandson, Conner, were murdered,” Rocha said in a statement.
“Scott Peterson was initially sentenced to death.
After his death sentence was overturned, he was resentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Our family believed that sentence would finally bring some measure of certainty. Victims should not have to spend the rest of their lives wondering whether the person responsible will receive another opportunity for release. Justice demands finality.”
Laci’s close friend Kim Juarez also spoke out.
“When Peterson’s death sentence was reduced to life without parole in 2021, Laci’s close friend Kim Juarez said she reluctantly accepted it because she believed it still meant he would never walk free. ‘The only certainty that we had when Scott was put away was that he wasn’t ever going to get out,’ she told Fox News Digital in a phone interview.
“That’s what, to me, is aggravating.”
Juarez described the last two decades as the repeated removal of scabs as Laci’s friends and family have watched appeals, a resentencing and now another potential avenue that could eventually lead to Peterson’s freedom.
Juarez described trauma that extended well outside of the courtroom and the legal process. Years after Peterson’s conviction, she was pregnant with her own first child. But she found herself gripped by the fear that what happened to her friend could happen to her. “I was about six months pregnant and I said, ‘If you decide that this isn’t the life you want, don’t kill me. Just let me go,'” she told her husband, a firefighter she’d met while handing out missing person flyers.
Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant on Christmas Eve in 2002, when she went missing from her Modesto home. Peterson was charged with killing her and their unborn son, Conner, when their bodies washed up months later in the San Francisco Bay.
“There was life before this happened and there’s life after this happened — this will always be a part of our lives,” Juarez said.
“She’s never forgotten, and we want to make her the focus of all of these memories, but it’s like he’s the cloud that hangs over it,” Juarez said.
“The likelihood of him getting out, I don’t know what the likelihood is, but the fact that it’s on the table, that it is a possibility, is scary in itself.”
The board defended its actions in public filings.
“What we can say is that these regulations do not release anyone from prison,” a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson said. “They establish a transparent process for the Board of Parole Hearings to provide expert public safety assessments to the courts and the governor, who remain the only decision-makers on resentencing or commutation.”
The initial reviews are scheduled to begin July 1, 2027, with hearings starting July 1, 2028.