Court clears way for clemency of NFL star’s father
Kenneth Clark also provided four new witnesses who identified another man as the shooter.
The state Supreme Court cleared the way Wednesday for Gov. Gavin Newsom to grant clemency and an early parole hearing to Kenneth Clark, a pro football player’s father who was convicted of a 2004 murder in San Bernardino and sentenced to 55 years to life in prison.
Clark, now 51, was found guilty of second-degree murder for the fatal shooting of Misael Rosales, who had driven into Clark’s car outside a convenience store. Clark has insisted he was innocent and noted that the prosecution’s eyewitness later recanted his testimony, but state and federal courts have rejected his appeals.
His son, Kenny Clark, who attended UCLA, has been a defensive tackle for the Green Bay Packers since 2016 and was selected for the Pro Bowl in 2019 and 2021.
State law requires the governor to seek approval from the court to consider clemency for anyone with felony convictions in at least two cases, and Clark Sr. had a 1990 conviction for armed robbery before the murder charge.
In a letter to the court in February, Newsom’s deputy legal affairs secretary, Eliza Hersh, said Clark “has demonstrated a commitment to rehabilitation while in prison. He earned his GED, completed vocational training, and has participated in self-help programming.”
Hersh said the state Board of Parole Hearings had recommended that the governor commute Clark’s sentence so that he could appear before the board in the near future and seek release on parole. She said Newsom was considering such a commutation if the court permitted it.
The court granted the request Wednesday, without comment or any indication of a dissenting opinion. The order allows Newsom to send Clark’s case to the parole board so it could decide whether to release him. Otherwise, he would not be eligible for parole for several decades.
In his unsuccessful appeals, Clark said the man who had identified him as the shooter submitted a sworn declaration after his testimony saying San Bernardino County prosecutors had threatened to imprison both him and his wife if he refused to implicate Clark. In a later hearing, the witness appeared before the trial judge and repeated his identification of Clark, but he subsequently recanted again and said he had yielded to the judge’s threat to have him charged with perjury. Clark also provided four new witnesses who identified another man as the shooter.
In upholding his murder conviction, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said in 2019 that Clark had offered “a significant amount of new evidence” but failed to show that no reasonable juror would have convicted him even after hearing the additional testimony.
Quoting an earlier ruling in another case, the three-judge panel said, “Recantation testimony is properly viewed with great suspicion.”