San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe will seek the death penalty in the case of Chunli Zhao, a farmworker accused of seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted first-degree murder for the fatal shooting of seven coworkers and the attempted murder of another in January 2023 at a mushroom farm in Half Moon Bay. The 68-year-old Zhao has pleaded not guilty.
According to KQED, Wagstaffe confirmed a report by NBC Bay Area that Zhao was angry about a workplace accident and had confronted his boss and a coworker about it before the attack. Both were shot.
The shooting brought to light the shameful living conditions of farmworkers in San Mateo County. Soon after it occurred, Gov. Gavin Newsom met with survivors of the attack. He issued a press release stating that he “witnessed firsthand the unacceptable living conditions of agriculture workers in this area.” And KQED reports that many of the farmworkers, most of whom are migrants, “often labor for sub-minimum wage at just $9 an hour and are forced to live in on-site shipping containers, as was the case for Zhao and some of the shooting victims.”
Wagstaffe, first elected district attorney in 2010, is a firm supporter of the death penalty. In 2022, he joined with San Bernardino and Riverside DAs Jason Anderson and Michael A. Hestrin in an attempt to intervene in a 2018 lawsuit filed by five men on California’s death row who argued that the state’s three-drug lethal injection protocol constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The plaintiffs and the state attorney general had agreed to dismiss the litigation without prejudice since the issue of method was moot in light of the moratorium on the death penalty imposed in 2019.
However, the three DAs argued that the state did not adequately represent their interests and sought to have the stays of execution lifted for the plaintiffs. After a federal judge disqualified their motion, they appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which was also denied. Wagstaffe, Anderson, and Hestrin then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court. It was denied on the first day of the Court’s new term in October 2022.
California’s last execution was in 2006. After Newsom imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in 2019, he closed San Quentin’s death row and dismantled the state’s execution chamber. The 587 people previously on death row have been transferred to state prisons around California and are housed with the general population.