Let’s put this in language Gavin Newsom can understand: Setting murderers free doesn’t work out well for presidential candidates.
That advice seems urgent in the wake of Newsom’s failure to stop the parole release of Alberto Tamez Jr., 75, who was convicted for the 1974 rape and murder of Genevieve Moreno.
Moreno was a 56-year-old wife and mother whose husband had expected to pick her up after work, as usual, the night she went missing.
Her body was found in a field the next day, brutalized and abandoned.
Tamez later admitted to beating and robbing her. He pleaded no contest to the murder charge.
San Luis Obispo County District Attorney Dan Dow told The California Post that he had tried his hardest to convince the parole board not to set Tamez free.
They didn’t listen, and the governor did nothing to intervene.
One would think Newsom had learned his lesson from other parole controversies earlier this year, such as the case of a convicted kidnapper and child molester who would have been set free had the Placer County DA not arrested him on fresh charges.
Newsom had claimed he was powerless in that case. But he certainly has reversed controversial paroles in the recent past.
Four years ago, Newsom reversed parole for Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy Sr. in a hotel ballroom in California in 1968.
So what is different now? Is it that the victim of the crime is neither an iconic symbol of the Democratic Party, nor linked to Hollywood celebrities, not connected with the political elite?
Newsom and his snarky press shop should Google “Willie Horton.”
Horton disappeared while on a furlough from a Massachusetts prison. He was later caught after breaking into a home in Maryland, raping a woman and stealing her fiancé’s car.
Al Gore (in the primary) and the George H.W. Bush made use of the issue to attack Democratic Party nominee Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign.
The ads run by Bush’s political strategist, Lee Atwater, are still controversial, but the lesson is that voters — at least outside of California — don’t think convicted murderers should be let loose.
If Newsom won’t listen to the people of California, whose support he takes for granted, maybe he’ll think about the views of the rest of the country.
Don’t politicians sometimes do the right thing, even for the wrong reason?
