California Gov. Gavin Newsom pardoned Friday a former inmate who was sentenced to life for the murder of her ex-pimp as a teenager.
This is the final step in a process of official redemption that spans more than ten years and three governors from both political parties.
She was one of nearly three dozen pardons or clemencies that were granted Friday to older and younger offenders. Henry Pachnowski (82 years old), was one of them. He was born to Polish parents and was later held in Nazi labor camps during World War II.
Sara Kruzan was just 16 when she murdered George Gilbert Howard in Riverside’s motel room. She was 17 years old when she was sentenced for the 1994 murder of George Gilbert Howard.
She was in prison for 18 years until Newsom, the former governor, released her. Jerry Brown released her in 2013.
Brown’s predecessor, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had just made Brown’s sentence commuteable to life with parole, shortly before he resigned in early 2011.
Kruzan was a celebre for reform groups and state legislators who sought to reduce harsh sentences for juvenile offenders.
Leland Yee was a Democratic senator and later went to prison. He called her case “a perfect example of adults who failed her, society failing her.” She was raped, raped, forced into prostitution by a predator, and she didn’t know it.
Newsom stated in his pardon that Kruzan had since proven that she was living a upright life.
He said that she had “transformed her life” and given herself up to community service since the murder. Newsom stated that while the pardon does not excuse her crime nor the damage she caused, it does acknowledge the hard work she did to change herself.
Kruzan was one of 17 pardons announced on Friday.
The governor’s office stated that a pardon doesn’t erase or expunge a conviction but it can reduce the impact on the recipient’s daily life. Three others, including one already deported, that he pardoned could be deported based on their criminal records.
Newsom commuted the sentences for 15 inmates currently in prison and granted reprieve to one inmate who is high-risk.
Commutations allow inmates to appear before a parole panel that will decide whether they are eligible for release.
The state’s corrections secretary recommended Darnell Green for one of the commutations. This was based on his extraordinary conduct in prison following his 1997 armed robbery, in which no one was injured.
Two other sentences that were commuted served their time as inmate firefighters.
Newsom commuted sentences for one inmate, who was detained at the age of 15, and another, who is now 78.
Newsom pardoned Pachnowski at age 82, who is now living in Maryland. In 1967, he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor of soliciting a sexual act in Orange County. He was sentenced to 10 days imprisonment and three years probation.
Pachnowski claimed that he was in consensual “intimacy,” with another man, in a car in deserted industrial areas when he was stopped by a security guard. He “said they had gone against God or nature” in his pardon application. Pachnowski said that he pleaded guilty in order to avoid being prosecuted on a more serious charge, “sex perversion.”
He stated in his application that a pardon would not only acknowledge and rectify the injustice I suffered because I was targeted and convicted for my sexuality, but it would also ensure that there are no future obstacles to me such as housing-related or employment-related ones that result from this conviction.
The governor pardoned Pachnowski for being convicted and sentenced to a charge that was used to “punish men for engaging in consensual sexual conduct with other women, criminalizing them on the basis of stigma, bias and ignorance.”
He wrote, “With this act executive clemency I acknowledge the inherent injustice in the conviction.”
Newsom has granted 129 pardons and 123 commutations to the law, as well as 35 reprieves.
