Sacramento Sheriff Jim Cooper holds victim statements during a news conference on Monday about the early release of David Allen Funston, who was convicted of 16 counts of kidnapping and child molestation in 1999.
The release of a serial child molester from state prison after he was granted parole has snowballed into a political fight that has angered victims and prosecutors and could lead to rollbacks of California’s laws that increase the chances of parole for aging inmates.
David Funston was granted parole from state prison after serving nearly 27 years for sexually assaulting young girls in Sacramento County.
The incident has outraged conservative politicians, many of whom have jumped at what they see as an opportunity to criticize Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Democrats, who they argue are too lenient on dangerous criminals. Newsom appointed many of the state parole board members but opposed Funston’s release and unsuccessfully asked the board to reconsider its decision.
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Now prosecutors appear to have found a loophole that could keep him detained.
After leaving the California Institution for Men in Chino on Thursday, the 64-year-old was transferred immediately to the Placer County Jail and held without bail to face a new charge: sexual assaults in 1995 on a 5-year-old girl, who was one of the prosecution witnesses at his 1999 trial in Sacramento.
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If convicted, he could again face a sentence of up to life in prison, with little prospect of ever being released. Under California’s Elderly Parole law, inmates who are 50 or older and are eligible for parole can ask the state Board of Parole Hearings for release after serving at least 20 years, a request the board granted to Funston last year after turning him down in 2022.
“I never imagined someone like him would get released. It’s an insult to justice and completely traumatic to children and their families,” Assembly Member Maggy Krell, D-Sacramento, said Friday as she announced legislation that would allow state officials to classify such inmates as Sexually Violent Predators. If granted parole, they would then be sent to a state hospital and held for treatment.
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Sen. Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, says he will introduce a bill that would exclude convicted sex offenders from the state’s Elderly Parole program.
Niello is one of many conservative lawmakers and politicians who’ve seized on Funston’s case.
On Tuesday, Newsom’s press office called criticisms of his involvement in the case “MAGA misinformation” and said “the Governor doesn’t agree with the outcome and has NO authority to reverse this independent decision per state law.”
That explanation did not satisfy his critics.
Senate Republican Leader Brian Jones, R-San Diego, responded: “Maybe you should sit this one out, Gaslight Gavin.”
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“Violent child predators get a second chance while victims get a life sentence,” California Republican Party Chair Corrin Rankin said in a statement Thursday. “That’s the reality of Gavin Newsom’s soft-on-crime California, where Democratic policies put predators back into our communities.”
Newsom’s authority is limited by the California Constitution. A 1988 amendment, approved by 55% of the voters and supported by Republican Gov. George Deukmejian, allowed the governor to reverse decisions by the parole board for murderers sentenced to up to life in prison with the possibility of parole, but not to inmates like Funston who were given similar sentences for non-murder crimes. So when a three-member Board of Parole Hearings panel voted last year to release Funston, Newsom’s last option was to ask for a new vote by the entire 21-member board, which then cast a majority vote to reaffirm his parole.
Attorney Maya Emig, who represented Funston in the Sacramento case, said the Parole Board expressly concluded her client “does not pose a current unreasonable risk to public safety.” She said she testified in his support at the board’s final hearing, and that there was no opposing testimony from prosecutors or crime victims.
But one unnamed victim, who testified at Funston’s trial that he had assaulted her when she was 3 years old, told the Sacramento Bee after the parole board decision that “the years he’s done are not enough. … He deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison.”
Sacramento County prosecutors said Funston, who was then 34, drove his car around Sacramento-area streets in 1995 looking for children and held out toys and candy to coax them inside. After raping and beating them, he left them on the roadside and drove off.
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He was convicted of crimes against seven girls and one boy, ages 3 to 7, and sentenced to three terms of 25 years to life in prison.
While Funston was denied release in 2022 by the Board of Parole Hearings, which was told that he had been classified as a “pedophile,” there has been no evidence that he committed any violent acts in prison.
He was not charged with crimes against the 5-year-old Placer County girl who testified for the prosecution about similar assaults against her in Roseville. But the now retired prosecutor in that case, Anne Marie Schubert, who later served as Sacramento County district attorney, says the girl was the assault victim in the newly announced charge against Funston in the neighboring county.
That case remains timely under California law. Most felonies have a statute of limitations — the deadline for filing criminal charges after the alleged crime — of no more than six years, although there are no time limits for murder charges. But sexual assault on a child can be charged until the child turns 40, and Placer County District Attorney Morgan Briggs Gyre says the charge against Funston — initially filed in the 1990s, and now refiled — complies with the law.
Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho said his office, after unsuccessfully opposing Funston’s parole, contacted Gyre this week and cited the case that could still be prosecuted in that county.
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“This defendant is the worst of the worst — a child predator who lures, grabs, kidnaps, and assaults children,” Ho said in a statement. “He will reoffend and is a ticking timebomb.”
But Daniel Macallair, who teaches criminal law courses at San Francisco State and is executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonprofit that seeks to reduce prison sentences, said the district attorneys appeared to be working together to reverse the parole decision.
“What appears to be happening here is that one elected prosecutor’s office is effectively responding to a parole decision it disagrees with by reviving a decades-old case it previously chose not to pursue,” Macallair told the Chronicle. “While they assert compliance with the statute of limitations, the broader policy question is whether this functions as a way to second-guess or override the parole process through a new prosecution.”
And James King, a former prisoner who is now director of programs at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, said paroled inmates in California have one of the nation’s lowest rates of committing new crimes after their release.
People like Funston, who have been extensively evaluated by prison and parole officials, pose “no risk to commit future acts of harassment,” King said.
