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.”
The effort failed: The Supreme Court of California overturned Lewis’s death sentence in 2018, and the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a measure banning the practice of adjusting IQ based on race in death penalty cases two years later.
Becerra is now polling first in the crowded race to replace term-limited Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. His campaign had at first lagged behind his opponents, but then-Rep. Eric Swalwell was hit with explosive sexual assault allegations — which he denies — and dropped out, and Becerra surged to the front of the field. He’s just ahead of Trump-backed Republican candidate Steve Hilton, followed by Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire racking up endorsements from progressive groups including Our Revolution and praise from the California chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
