Families incensed as rollout of death penalty resentencings begins in Santa Clara County

"There's no one on our side," said a woman who as a teen survived a 1985 kidnapping and stabbing where a 16-year-old girl died. "It's very unfair."

SAN JOSE — Stacey Andrade King was so choked up that her youngest daughter stepped up to the microphone in a Santa Clara County courtroom to read her prepared remarks about the prospect of resentencing the man who murdered King’s mother.

Her brother, Thomas Andrade, used his emotion to speak out.

Mark Christopher Crew — convicted of murder in the 1982 disappearance of his new wife, Nancy Jo Andrade, whose body was never found — is “a calculated, manipulative, cold-blooded killer,” Thomas Andrade told Williams, and “justice will be betrayed instead of fully served” if Crew’s death penalty were converted to a life sentence.

Crew is one of 14 men condemned to death for crimes in Santa Clara County that the district attorney’s office has petitioned to resentence. District Attorney Jeff Rosen, in announcing the move in April, contended that capital punishment has been unjustly administered in California throughout its history. When paired with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s ongoing moratorium on state executions and the accompanying dismantling of death row, Rosen said, seeking and upholding death sentences is an unjustifiable pursuit and a drain on resources.

Ultimately, Williams approved the recall and resentencing for Crew on Friday, in part deferring to prosecutors’ assertion that there were no public safety risks imposed because he was not being released from prison.

That final decision came after heart-wrenching victim-impact statements from King, Andrade, and other relatives of Nancy Jo Andrade. Sandy Wilhelmi George, Nancy’s younger sister, spoke about how the victim’s unresolved disappearance upended her family as her late father leveraged his finances in a fruitless quest to find his daughter’s body.

“Our family fell apart,” George said.

Outside the courthouse Friday, Andrade and King voiced their disappointment that her family’s pleas did not affect the hearing’s outcome, and wanted it known what they are experiencing.

“We have to apply as much public pressure as possible,” Andrade said.

King added, “We’re going to fight still … and go after Rosen.”

For his part, Rosen said he expected and was prepared for such blowback, and stood firm on his reasoning for the petitions.

“In these death penalty cases that we are resentencing, no one is being released from custody,” Rosen said in an interview. “I believe you can be tough on crime and against the death penalty. Spending decades in prison, and dying in prison, is pretty tough.”

References to the impact of race on capital punishment in California has largely been met with skepticism from the victims’ families, who note that most of the killers and victims were white. But the district attorney counters by asserting that race infects the process on more systemic levels, including how the murders of white victims are more likely to receive capital consideration and how jurors are selected in capital cases.

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Rosen also cited studies that found 80% of capital sentences are overturned or modified, at least in part. He argued that converting them to lifetime prison terms, with no chance of release, also excludes these prisoners from the extensive appellate rights and legal resources that death row inmates receive.

“We tried in this state to make the death penalty work for decades, and it’s not working. It’s enormously expensive, the appeals are endless, and there are no executions happening for a number of reasons, besides the moratorium. The state has not shown it can constitutionally impose the death penalty,” Rosen said.

Rosen also acknowledges that he’s up against powerful optics: The list of condemned men he’s petitioning to resentence off death row are a who’s who of some of the most infamous killers in Bay Area history. All but one of the capital cases up for resentencing were prosecuted before Rosen entered office in 2011.

That includes the case of James Francis O’Malley, who was convicted of the murder-for-hire killing of Sharley Ann German in 1986, for the separate murder of Richard Oliver Parr while trying to steal his motorcycle, and for the murder of Michael Robertson, after suspecting Robertson might tell authorities about Parr’s killing. Thursday, O’Malley was the first condemned man to be resentenced under Rosen’s initiative.

German’s niece, Lisa Beeman, appeared in court to represent her family and similarly pleaded with Williams to preserve O’Malley’s death sentence. Williams gave similar legal reasoning to what he gave Friday for approving the DA’s petition, which Beeman said gave her a feeling that the hearings she and other victims’ families are scheduled to attend, with many traveling across the country to do so, are largely moot.

“I believed my voice mattered and that I would be able to convince the judge, but obviously that was not the case,” Beeman said in an interview. “It did feel like it was predetermined, that the decision had already been made. That it was just show.”

Laurie VanLandingham, née McKenna, is the surviving victim of David Allen Raley, who in 1985 was a security guard for the Carolands mansion near Hillsborough when he kidnapped then-17-year-old McKenna and 16-year-old Jeanine Grinsell after offering them a tour of the mansion. Over the next half day, Raley beat and stabbed the two girls dozens of times before dumping them down a steep ravine off Silver Creek Road in San Jose.

VanLandingham told this newspaper in 2006 how she eventually crawled up the ravine and, covered in blood, sat on the road waiting for a passing motorist to help. Eventually, someone did come, and the two girls were rescued and taken to a hospital, where Jeanine died on the operating table from one of the puncture wounds on her neck.

“Nothing has changed in the case, but somehow everything’s changed, and nothing’s changed in the law either,” she said in an interview about the resentencing petitions. “All of a sudden, I’m defending myself, and it’s just a weird, strange place to be in.”

Raley is “in a certain class all by himself, most of the people are,” she said, referring to the men up for resentencing. “He cannot be rehabilitated. I just don’t understand the move.”

“There’s no one on our side,” she said. “It’s very unfair.”

Jeanine’s brother, Reed Grinsell, said in an interview: “David Raley is right where he deserves to be: With a death sentence like the one he gave my sister.”

Tony LoBue’s sister Rosellina was 18 in 1987 when Erik Sanford Chatman stabbed her to death at the San Jose photo developing shop where she worked, with Chatman’s 2½-year-old son in tow. LoBue was in court supporting Beeman and the extended Andrade family even though Chatman’s hearing isn’t until next month and voiced strong contempt for Rosen.

“Not only is it a knife in the back and a betrayal of the victims, but it’s also a betrayal of the California voters, who have continuously supported capital punishment,” LoBue said, before turning his ire toward the district attorney and governor. “They’re going rogue, going against what the voting people want.”

LoBue objected to the rationale that Rosen has given for the resentencings, saying the current state of affairs did not warrant this action.

“The idea we have to resentence these people is not required,” he said. “We should be leaving this alone, and let the victims quietly wait and be patient with what’s happening with the system.”

Rosen said he knows no amount of explanation can bring comfort to the affected families but remained resolute.

“I wish we could do the one thing they want, which is to bring their loved one back,” he said. “I hope that these families, in talking with other families, find strength from one another and find some measure of peace from knowing this person who committed this horrific crime will die in prison.”