Schwarzenegger’s shameful last act
By Michelle Malkin
MichelleMalkin.com
Retiring celebrity governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of
California was bad for the GOP in so many ways,
I’ve
stopped
counting
them.
So, how did Schwarzenegger leave office? By
committing one last shameful act of back-scratching
politics as usual and granting a commutation to the
son of a Democrat political crony, former California
Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (his longtime
collaborator on
job-killing
environmental regulations) .
Nunez’s privileged son, Esteban, was serving 16
years (already a reduced sentence resulting from a
plea bargain) for his role in the
vengeful stabbing/manslaughter of a
college student, Luis Santos. Nunez and other
defendants were involved in a
conspiracy to cover up the crime,
according to another member of their gang. Before he
pleaded guilty, Nunez had his lawyers
trying to
blame the victim for his death. Oh,
and there’s this damning piece of
responsibility-evading crap from Nunez that was
admitted as evidence before Nunez ducked trial:
Schwarzenegger the movie tough guy didn’t have the
balls to notify the murder victim’s family of the
partial commutation, according to the L.A. Times.
In his final night before leaving office, Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger commuted the prison sentence
of the son of former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez
who had pleaded guilty to taking part in the slaying
of a college student.
Schwarzenegger announced the move in a batch of
eleventh-hour press releases e-mailed to reporters…
…Fabian Nuñez, a Democrat, grew close to the
governor while speaker. The two worked together to
pass the state’s landmark global warming law, which
was a signature achievement of Schwarzenegger’s time
in office. Fabian Nuñez is a business partner of the
governor’s chief political advisor at the consulting
firm Mercury Public Affairs.
“We are totally outraged,” said Fred Santos, the
father of Luis Santos. “For the governor to wait
until the last day in hopes it would fly under the
radar is an absolute injustice.”
Santos, a software engineer in Concord in Northern
California, said Esteban Nuñez “had already gotten
lucky once” when prosecutors accepted a plea bargain
that allowed him to avoid standing trial on murder
charges, which could have led to a life sentence.
He said the family was not warned about the
impending commutation and learned about it Sunday
from reporters.
Arnie didn’t have time to pay the Santos family the
courtesy of a heads-up. But he did have time to chum
it up with Nunez at a
high-powered global warming shindig
in October and
yuk it up together at his retirement roast
last month:
This is bipartisan political cronyism at its worst.
DLTDHYOTWO, Governator.