S.F.’s inmate on Death Row gets life instead
Clifford Bolden, San Francisco’s only Death Row inmate, had his sentence for a 1986 murder reduced to life with the possibility of parole Tuesday in a plea agreement with District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
Bolden, then 32, was convicted of robbing and fatally stabbing Henry Michael Pedersen, 46, whom he had met in a Castro neighborhood bar in September 1986. He was tried and sentenced to death in 1991, four years before the election of District Attorney Terence Hallinan, the first in a series of chief San Francisco prosecutors who have opposed the death penalty and refused to seek it in court. That practice has been continued by Kamala Harris, George Gascón and Boudin.
“I hope that other prosecutors and political leaders in the country follow our lead — one that is consistent with Governor (Gavin) Newsom’s moratorium on the death penalty — and end this barbaric practice,” Boudin said in a statement.
Newsom has declared a moratorium on
executions but has not commuted any death sentences or tried to prevent local prosecutors from seeking the death penalty. California last executed a prisoner in January 2006 and has 722 inmates on Death Row.
Bolden was resentenced to 47 years to life in prison on Tuesday by Superior Court Judge Loretta Georgi. He is now 65 and will be eligible for parole consideration at age 79.
“This settlement recognizes the failures of the criminal justice system, while also acknowledging that Mr. Bolden ... is a reformed person who has not received a disciplinary writeup in over 25 years,” said his current lawyers, Jonathan Aminoff and Patricia Young, deputy federal public defenders in Los Angeles. “As a result of this resolution, Mr. Bolden will have a future opportunity to demonstrate to a parole board that he is not a threat to anyone and deserves to spend his remaining years outside of prison walls.”
His lawyers also want the prison system to transfer Bolden out of San Quentin, which is facing an outbreak of COVID19 that already has been blamed in the deaths of a number of Death Row inmates.
At Bolden’s trial, prosecution witnesses said he had met Pedersen at the Pendulum bar on 18th Street the day of the murder. Bolden had been paroled from San Quentin State Prison earlier in the year, after serving about seven years for two manslaughter convictions.
Pedersen was found dead in the bathtub of his Corbett Avenue apartment. Police said they had found Bolden’s fingerprints in Pedersen’s apartment. They also said some of Pedersen’s possessions had been discovered in Bolden’s clothing or his apartment, the basis for the robbery conviction that made it a capital case.
In a court filing supporting the plea agreement, Boudin’s office cited new defense evidence that Bolden had been suffering from schizophrenia at the time of the crime, but the jury had never learned about it.
The district attorney’s office also released a statement from the noted death penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean: “Over the years, even as so many prosecutors demeaned and terminated human life by seeking death, the DAs of San Francisco have gleamed as a beacon of humanity by refusing to be a part of the culture of death. I thank God for you.”