On the morning of Dec. 19, 1998, Ellen Salling, 76, was baking Christmas cookies in her Lucerne home. Jerrold Elwin Johnson came in, beat her to death and drove away in her car. He was sentenced to death in 2000.
On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that he plans to change every death sentence in California to life in prison without the possibility of parole. That change would cover 548 people. Johnson and Gerald Frank Stanley, who shot his wife, Cindy Rogers Stanley, in Nice in 1980, are the two whose cases were charged in Lake County.
Both men have more than one felony conviction. Under the California Constitution, a governor can’t make that change for anyone with more than one felony conviction unless the state Supreme Court recommends it first, with at least four justices agreeing.
What the court has to do
Newsom sent his request to Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero and the associate justices Thursday. It covers 382 of the 548 people on death row. Those are the people the governor’s office found, by checking state criminal history records, to have more than one felony conviction. Stanley and Johnson are both on that list.
Newsom asked the court to send its recommendation “by the end of this year so that I may act before the end of my term.”
In procedures it adopted in 2018, the court described its job as checking whether the governor’s action would be “an abuse of that power.” Its recommendation is “not a recommendation that the Governor grant” clemency, the governor’s power to commute sentences and grant pardons.
The governor’s clemency page says: “The commutations will not go into effect until the necessary legal steps are completed.”
Stanley: the shooting in Nice
Stanley met Cindy Rogers on July 3, 1980, at the fairgrounds in Hayfork. They married July 7, 1980, in Reno. Her parents, the Spatigs, ran the Spatig motel-resort in Nice, near Clear Lake.
That July, according to the state Supreme Court’s 1995 ruling upholding his sentence, he burned down her house in Lucerne and then burned her car. On July 20 she filed felony charges against him.
On the evening of Aug. 11, 1980, he hid behind a tree across the road from the resort with a rifle fitted with a scope. Cindy was sitting with her father near the pool, where her son was playing. Stanley shot her through the heart. She died almost instantly.
The jury found that Stanley killed her while lying in wait, and to keep her from testifying against him. He already had a murder conviction. In 1975 he killed his second wife, Kathy Rhiley Stanley, and was convicted of second-degree murder.
His trial was moved to Butte County, and he was sentenced to death in 1984.
Johnson: the killing in Lucerne
On Dec. 18, 1998, police tried to stop Johnson’s van for a parole violation. He got away. The next morning he walked into Salling’s home in the Kono Tayee area of Lucerne. Cookie dough and a mixer were still on her kitchen counter when she was found.
He took her purse, her jewelry and her car. Officers caught him on Dec. 21 after another high-speed chase, this time in her car. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and found that he killed her during a robbery, a burglary and a carjacking. The state Supreme Court upheld the sentence in 2015.
Johnson’s earlier conviction came out of Sonoma County. In 1993 he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of Jennifer Von Seggern. Her body, bound and wrapped in a sleeping bag, was found in an isolated area of Sonoma County on Jan. 12, 1993.
What a commutation does
A commutation wouldn’t free either man. The governor’s fact sheet says it does not release anyone, make anyone eligible for parole, pardon anyone or change a conviction. It changes the sentence from death to life in prison without parole.
California hasn’t executed anyone since Jan. 17, 2006.
Victims registered with the state corrections department’s Office of Victim and Survivor Rights and Services will be told when the commutations take effect. Families can reach that office at victimservices@cdcr.ca.gov or 877-256-6877.
Until the justices answer, Stanley and Johnson are still under sentence of death.