SAN JOSE — Richard Allen Davis, the man condemned to death row for the notorious killing of 12-year-old Polly Klaas in the North Bay three decades ago, was denied a longshot resentencing bid by a Santa Clara County judge on Friday.
Davis, 69, was not present at Friday’s hearing in the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Benjamin Williams, who reviews many of the resentencing cases that are presented in the county.
Even though the prospect of Davis getting a new sentence had low odds, Polly’s father, Marc Klaas, and other opponents were aghast that Davis even got this consideration, and voiced wariness about what it could portend for incarceration of the state’s most violent offenders.
Ultimately, Williams said he saw Davis’ petition “a collateral attack on the death sentence” Davis was given in 1996, rather than a legitimate request for resentencing under the guidelines of a recent criminal justice reform law that went into effect in California two years ago.
“Accordingly the petition is denied,” Williams said Friday. “It is so ordered.”
Marc Klaas, the father of murder victim Polly Klaas, wears a button with his daughters face at Santa Clara Superior Court in San Jose, Calif., on Friday, April 5, 2024. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
Senate Bill 483 retroactively struck down mandatory sentencing enhancements based on a person’s prior convictions, which along with other similarly minded legislative reforms has spurred resentencing petitions throughout the state. When these resentencing reviews are granted, it’s not just the mandatory terms that are examined; judges have the latitude to reevaluate, and possibly modify, the entirety of a prison sentence.
Attorneys from the Federal Public Defender’s Office, representing Davis, argued in a February court filing and subsequent hearing that the law that took effect in 2022 invalidates Davis’ sentencing enhancements for four prior serious felony convictions and three previous prison terms and entitles him to a full resentencing. Sonoma County prosecutors argued that the law doesn’t apply to his death sentence and would affect only two years worth of his prison sentence on other charges related to the crime.
In his ruling, Williams took issue with several elements of Davis’ petition, and said it amounted to seeking a “vacature” of Davis’ trial conviction, which he said “goes beyond the resentencing” relief that SB 483 is meant to provide.
Given that intent, Williams reasoned, Davis’ petition “does not support the outcome sought by the petitioner.”
The odds were stacked against Davis in getting resentenced, as a condemned prisoner who is not eligible for parole. He did receive some relief in 2019 when Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a moratorium on executions in California and later ordered the dismantling of death row at San Quentin State Prison. Davis has since been transferred to a state prison facility in Stockton.
Even SB 483’s author, State Sen. Ben Allen, D-El Segundo, previously said the law, intended to improve fairness in the legal system, was not meant to apply to condemned people and supported the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office in opposing Davis being resentenced.
On Oct. 1, 1993, Polly Klaas was having a slumber party with two friends at her mother’s Petaluma home when Davis, a stranger, entered her bedroom armed with a knife, bound and blindfolded the friends and kidnapped Polly.
Police, unaware at the time of Polly’s kidnapping, helped free Davis’ car from a ditch on a private road a few hours later. He only became a suspect two months later when evidence of the crime was found near the same ditch, and after detectives discovered Davis had been paroled that summer after being imprisoned for violently kidnapping a woman and had a lengthy history of crimes against women.
He was arrested that November for a parole violation, and on Dec. 4, authorities found Polly’s body in a shallow grave near Cloverdale using information that Davis gave them.
Davis was charged with her murder, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted lewd acts on a child. Friday’s hearing was in Santa Clara County because his original trial was moved to the South Bay due to intense publicity around the case. Davis has been on death row since being convicted in 1996.
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Outrage over Polly’s murder helped California famously adopt a series of tough-on-crime laws, including the “three strikes” law that imposed life prison sentences for serious repeat offenders and the state’s Megan’s Law sex offender registry.
But the impact of those laws would eventually lead to a series of legislative actions in the past decade to relieve prison overcrowding, to comply with a U.S. Supreme Court order ruling that state prison conditions were violating thousands of prisoners’ constitutional rights.
Among those reform laws were Proposition 47, which reclassified some nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors to slow the flow of nonviolent offenders into the prison system, and Assembly Bill 109, which shifted the administration of lesser prison sentences and parole to counties and local jails. Senate Bill 1393, passed in 2019, empowered judges to strike previously mandatory 5-year sentencing enhancements, helping pave the way for Allen’s bill.
Last year, Klaas announced he was sunsetting the foundation named after his slain daughter that pushed for the crime legislation and helped hundreds of families search for missing kids.
Judge Williams grappled with a similar resentencing bid earlier this year in the case of Eric Patrick Martin, who was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison for serial rapes committed in the 1970s and 1980s. An odd sequence of events led to him getting resentencing consideration under SB 1393, including the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation recommending a resentencing hearing, then later rescinding that recommendation, and an appeals court upholding the initial recommendation on technical grounds.
Ultimately, Williams ruled against Martin, noting the severity of his crimes — including twice escaping jail custody between crime sprees — and the absence of what he considered sufficient rehabilitative work to prove he could be safely released.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Staff writers Jakob Rodgers and John Woolfolk contributed to this report.
