Rep. Ash Kalra convinces Assembly members Nick Schultz, LaShae Sharp-Collins, Mark González, John Harabedian and Matt Haney to back early parole eligibility for murderers, attempted murderers, serial rapists and car jackers 

In late March, Nicole Wines couldn’t get her mind off the upcoming parole hearing: Every time Wines is notified that her sibling’s killer is being considered for release, it forces her to re-imagine the unimaginable.

In 2003, Eric Diehl was living in Sacramento when he suddenly vanished. For Wines, Diehl was the ultimate big brother – always protective and supportive of her. He was someone who made her feel safe. She also remembers Diehl as a musician who loved jamming with other players around the Capital City and cheering on local bands that performed in Sacramento’s clubs. When Diehl, who was 32, disappeared, his friends and family immediately tried contacting his much older wife, Michelle Dufur. She told them that Diehl cut out for Lodi and was basically off-grid.

But Dufur knew exactly where her husband was.

By her own admission, Dufur was mad at Diehl for having her arrested for domestic violence. She got up one morning to find her husband sleeping in a back room of their house after he’d promised to look for a job. Dufur changed out of her clothes and put on a pair of overalls, carefully filling their pockets with different knives. Then she collected an assortment of other grim items from around the house. Dufur snuck up on Diehl while he was resting, bashed him with a cinder block, threw scalding-hot liquid Draino in his face, hoping to blind him, and went on to stab him 24 times with knives she was pulling out of the overalls. Having murdered Diehl, she started living in the house with his decomposing body. She’d head off in the mornings for work at Apple before coming home at night as if nothing had happened. Wines and her parents spent six tormented weeks wondering what had happened to Diehl.

Dufur only reported her husband’s corpse to authorities after burglars broke into her house while she was gone, raising the possibility they might anonymously tip-off police.

Wines had to replay all these shuddering scenes in her mind when Dufur first came up for parole in 2018, and then again as a new hearing was scheduled for April 4 of this year.

“Just leading up to the hearing over a few weeks – the anxiety is insane,” Wines said. “It’s that worrying, and that fear, that they’re going to get out; and you don’t know how you’re going to live with that.”

But in one respect, Dufur’s latest parole hearing was far more stressful for Wines than the one in 2018. That’s because Wines had become aware of numerous extremely violent offenders in California being granted parole years before they were even supposed to have their first hearing.

A number of those individuals committed their crimes in the Sacramento area.

One of them, Jeffrey Powell, was involved in a home invasion in the middle of the night that led to stabbing a Citrus Heights man to death in his bed. Powell, an alleged leader of the violent white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood gang, was given a sentence of 16-years-to-life. He served only 10 years before being granted early parole. A similar case was that of Kyle Frank, who was convicted of a series of racially motivated shootings around Sacramento County. Frank was originally sentenced to 90 years for attempting to gun-down random Black and Latino citizens and wounding one of his targets. Though sentenced to nine decades, he didn’t even serve a decade-and-a-half. Frank was granted early parole, despite the fact that he committed two assaults in-custody on behalf of a white power prison gang, according to Sacramento District Attorney Thien Ho. Most recently, Charity Ann Williams, who stomped a battered and helpless 19-year-old boy to death in Roseville’s trainyard, was granted early parole. Williams was sentenced to 15-years-to-life for her crime. She served only seven years.

“I know there’s people getting out of prison right now that, when you hear about it, it is mind-blowing,” Wines reflected.   

For several years, prosecutors have asserted that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR, has been using a loophole in 2016’s voter-approved Prop. 57 to hand out ‘credits’ for early parole consideration to offenders with indeterminate life sentences. The DAs have especially raised concerns that CDCR has “a zero-transparency policy” for how these credits are calculated. Victims groups recently sued CDCR over this, convincing a judge to temporarily block the department’s ability to issue some of these vaguely defined credits. 

Now, San Jose Assemblyman Ash Kalra, a democrat, has authored Assembly Bill 622 to try to put the power of early releases back into CDCR’s hands. In April, Kalra convinced a majority of democrats on the Assembly Public Safety Committee to advance that bill.

One person who was disturbed but not surprised was Amador County District Attorney Todd Riebe. A prosecutor in California for 26 years, Riebe is worried that the Assembly Public Safety Committee has become a gate-keeping entity for a political agenda rather than focusing on what its name implies – public safety. Riebe’s own office is in the middle of handling the case of Joseph Jenkins, a parolee who went on a stabbing rampage in the small town of Ione. Jenkins had previously been sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempted murder after stabbing his uncle (a crime that followed Jenkins brutally beating his grandfather). He was released after serving only 11 years. On October 30, 2023, Jenkins started randomly stabbing Ione residents, hospitalizing a young man, maiming a PG&E worker and ultimately slaying a 63-year-old woman named Lori Owens at her own home.  

“I think we can all recognize on both sides of the aisle that there are cases that involve people who should never be released,” said Riebe. “Jenkins is one of them … There used to be certainty, or predictability, in sentences. And that’s gone. I don’t know what to tell a victim anymore. It’s just galling. It really has altered what we say and communicate with victims at the pre-trial level as to expectations. I don’t know what to tell the victim’s family in the Jenkins case.”

The prosecutor added, “In terms of the credits that were being issued for early releases, CDCR has been doing this, until they got stopped, since 2021; and between 2021 and 2023, violent crime rose 9.6% in the state, property crime 4.3% and their own recidivism study shows they’re a failure.”  

Ash Kalra explains, defends AB 622

Kalra maintains that AB 622 isn’t automatically initiating early paroles, but rather helping CDCR officials get more cases to the parole board for consideration.

“Under existing law, individuals with an indeterminate life sentences, such as seven-years-to-life, or 25-years-to-life, can get credits for good conduct or rehabilitative programming,” Karla pointed out to the public safety committee on April 8. “These credits allow individuals to advance their minimum eligible parole date, which will only make them eligible for parole. But eligibility does not guarantee release.”

To support that point, Kalra referenced a statistic from CDCR that, in 2024, the parole board approved only 14% of the paroles that were scheduled for hearings.

Kalra was also clear that his bill was in response to victims’ litigation holding up early releases.

“This has created unnecessary, costly delays in paroles,” Kalra said of the lawsuit.

Speaking on behalf of AB 622 was Heather MacKay, an attorney at the Prison Law Office.

Referencing a disputed claim that the early releases of violent offenders was built into the voter-approved Prop. 57, MacKay said, “This is a rational solution to California’s extreme prison overcrowding issue.”

MacKay went on to argue that passing AB 622 was about “people who have been found suitable for parole and are still in prison,” adding, “and that number is growing: This is devastating for individuals who have worked hard to get a parole grant, and it’s also costly to the state.”

Speaking against AB 622 at the hearing was Michelle Contois of California District Attorneys Association.

“Today, in California, indeterminate sentences are reserved primarily for the very worst offenders,” Contois observed. “Murderers, serial rapists; and this is why the law requires they serve every day of their minimum term. As the Criminal Justice League pointed out in its letter, indeterminate sentence prisoners already do have incentives to participate in programming, and that incentive is to be released as soon as possible when their minimum term is served.”

Contois also noted that AB 622 “breaks California’s constitutional promise to victims of crimes that there be truth, consistency and reliability in sentencing.”

Carl London of Crime Victims United echoed that sentiment during the hearing.

“We think this bill undercuts accountability for California’s most serious offenders,” London argued.

Asked to respond to these criticisms by Assembly Public Safety Chair Nick Schultz, Kalra answered, “This is an opportunity for us to recognize that people really can change.”

Schulz, a democrat representing Burbank, voted to advance AB 622, as did assembly member Dr. LaShae Sharp-Collins – a San Diego democrat – who seconded the committee’s support for the bill. Democratic Assembly member Mark González of Los Angeles, democratic member John Harabedian of Pasadena and democratic member Matt Haney of San Francisco also voted to advance AB 622.  

The bill passed out of committee on a 5-4 vote.

Two weeks later, separate from the bill’s progress, CDCR granted an early parole to Herbert Brown III, who was convicted in 2015 of viciously beating his 22-month-old daughter, Lily, to death in Paso Robles.  

What voters want, what victims experience

Democrats on the Public Safety Committee threw their weight behind AB 622 on National Crime Victims Week, a bleak irony pointed out by analyst Steve Smith. That was also the week that Nichole Wines and her family arrived at the women’s prison in Chowchilla to face Michelle Dufur in-person, again.

Wines had been warned by those working in victims’ advocacy to brace for Dufur getting released. Sacramento, Placer and San Luis Obispo aren’t the only counties seeing some of their most-violent offenders being granted early parole: Advocates had recently watched serial rapist Andrew Luster get released after serving less than half of his 50-year sentence, as well as an early parole granted to Patrick Good­man, who was convicted of breaking the neck and ribs of a three-year-old pre-schooler in San Francisco while pummeling the child to death.

As heinous as Dufur’s crime against Diehl was, news headlines across California in 2024 left victims’ advocates with little reason for optimism. 

However, Wines says that despite parole commissioners all but spelling out what they needed to hear from Dufur when they saw her next, back in 2018, the inmate showed up to her April 4 hearing woefully unprepared. Wines told News & Review that Dufur struggled to answer important questions, frequently engaged in victim-blaming, which the commissioners noticed, and wasn’t able to articulate a plausible post-release plan for blending back into society.

Basically, as Wines tells it, Dufur flopped on the verbal examination as hard as she could imagine any convict failing it.

The parole was denied.

From one vantage point, Dufur’s situation can be seen as bolstering Assemblyman Kalra’s claim that parole commissioners take their jobs seriously and aren’t granting a majority of requests. Wines, however, is haunted by what might have happened if Dufur had put even the bare minimal effort into prepping for her hearing.

Riebe says that all one needs to do is look at who’s been released early to see why that’s a valid concern.

“The minimum eligible parole hearing has become almost tantamount to a parole date, even though the maximum date may be years away,” Riebe stressed.

For now, Wines is trying not to think about Dufur’s next parole hearing in three years. She knows that, when it comes, it will be another instance when her family experiences weeks of inhaling stress with each and every breath.

“This absolutely destroyed my dad,” she admitted. “Everything I remember my dad being before the day of the murder, he never was again.”  

Riebe has heard similar stories from the many victims he’s gotten to know. When it comes to all the early parolee hearings that AB 622 would usher in, the prosecutor notes that the Assembly Public Safety Committee advanced Kalra’s bill as if California voters hadn’t just overwhelmingly passed Prop. 36, which strengthened penalties on a number of drug and property crimes associated with public disorder. For Riebe, the Public Safety Committee is living in a bubble.  

“It’s just another erosion in the confidence that the public has in our criminal justice system as it currently exists,” Riebe said. “Voters are tired of these kinds of laws that make them less safe, but instead of listening, the Safety Committee is doubling down on stupid policy – and dangerous and reckless policy. You get exasperated. You think you’ve seen it all, but some people didn’t get the memo, I guess, that Prop. 36 should have been a wake-up call.”

Scott Thomas Anderson is also the writer and producer of true crime documentary podcast series ‘Trace of the Devastation’