“Becerra’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.”

CALIFORNIA – In case you missed it, Xavier Becerra is once again under fire for his record –  this time over damaging criminal justice policies he pursued during his tenure as California’s top law enforcement official. An article in The Intercept points to Becerra’s defense of race-based IQ adjustments in a death penalty case – which Becerra deployed to argue for the execution of a Black man – along with criticism of his weak approach to police accountability. That includes opposition to transparency measures, resistance to independent investigations into police shootings, and close ties to powerful law enforcement unions. 

The Intercept also details more than $600,000 in campaign contributions from law enforcement unions during his run for attorney general. As AG, Becerra enacted a range of regressive policies lobbied for by those unions.,Those contributions have continued during his run for governor, with the law enforcement groups contributing to the anti-Steyer independent expenditure. 

“Advocates and families impacted by Becerra’s actions know first-hand that Becerra puts powerful interests ahead of justice for the people of California,” said Steyer for Governor spokesperson Ariana Andrade. “We deserve more from our next governor."   

Excerpts of the The Intercept article are below and can be found here.

When leading California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra was state attorney general, his office pushed the state Supreme Court to artificially inflate a Black man’s IQ in order to execute him. 

Following the lead of his predecessor, former California Attorney General Kamala Harris, Becerra’s office was battling a defense that argued Robert Lewis, originally sentenced to death in 1991, was ineligible for execution because he was intellectually disabled. Lewis’s attorney, Robert Sanger, told The Intercept that while individual attorneys general can’t control everything their deputies do, he was disappointed with how Becerra’s office handled the case. 

I was kind of feeling like it would be a good time for the AG to say, ‘OK, we tried and he’s intellectually disabled. We got that determination made. Let’s just let it go,’” Sanger recalled. “Instead, it went all the way to oral arguments in front of the [state] Supreme Court.”

…

In Lewis’s case, Becerra picked up where Harris left off; her office had been the first to ask the courts to artificially inflate Lewis’s IQ so the state could execute him. 

On the one hand, he’s part of a long line of Democratic attorney generals who have taken this approach of, ‘It’s not my problem,’ not accepting responsibility for what their criminal attorneys are doing in court,” said Natasha Minsker, who leads the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition, which helped push the bill banning the practice of race-based IQ adjustments for people on death row. “On the other hand, it just demonstrates where their true priorities and values are.

…

“We see this repeatedly,” Minsker said. “Democratic politicians want to take credit for the progressive things they did as attorney general, but they are not taking responsibility for the regressive positions that the office advanced under their leadership.” 

Becerra’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

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As attorney general, Becerra also faced criticism for shielding police from measures designed to hold them accountable. Two major California newspaper editorial boards wrote scathing criticisms in 2019 saying Becerra sided with law enforcement “against public transparency” and had betrayed both “public trust and the law” by not complying with a state police transparency law. 

At the time, Becerra threatened to charge journalists with crimes unless they destroyed a list of police officers convicted of crimes. Becerra took more than $300,000 in campaign funds from law enforcement unions in his run for attorney general. The political action committee for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, a state prison guards’ union, gave $320,000 to a group backing Becerra and other candidates that cycle. News outlets raised questions about his ability to “police the police,” while owing much of his campaign support to their unions. 

The prison guard’s union gave $25,000 in March to a group opposing Steyer. The group, “California is Not for Sale, No on Steyer for Governor 2026, a Coalition of Housing Advocates, Labor and Small Business,” is spending $24 million against Steyer and is backed by the state’s real estate and energy industries. Steyer is self-funding his campaign with more than $120 million. The CCPOA did not respond to a request for comment.

The prison guards’ union is one of many special interest groups that have played an outsized role in California politics, said James King, a formerly incarcerated prison reform advocate in Oakland. King, who is supporting Steyer, said the CCPOA was spending against Steyer because he is campaigning against those kinds of special interests. Plus, the union wants to preserve its budget, which has increased even as the state has shrunk its prison population in recent years, King said.

It’s deeply ironic” that groups including the CCPOA “are funding an initiative called ‘California is Not for Sale,’” King said. “They have shown time and time again that they are only interested in advancing the status quo. And it’s clear that any candidate they are working to oppose and spending money to oppose, they must see as a threat to the status quo.

In 2020, Becerra sided with law enforcement again to oppose a bill to require independent state investigations of police killings after previously having refused to conduct an independent investigation into the police killing of 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa, whom a police officer shot in the back of the head. Becerra’s office later launched an investigation into destruction of evidence in the case. 

Monterrosa’s sister, Michelle Monterrosa, told the San Francisco Standard last week that she won’t vote for Becerra in the gubernatorial election. “How can we trust someone who continues to put his own advancement before actually standing with the people?” Monterrosa said.”

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