William Westwood Lockyer (born May 8, 1941) is an American politician and lawyer from the state of California. A Democrat, he served in both houses of the state legislature. He spent the last four years of his State Senate tenure as president pro tempore. He then served as California Attorney General from 1999 to 2007, and as California State Treasurer from 2007 to 2015.
Early life and education Lockyer was born in Hayward, California, on May 8, 1941. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.A. in Political Science in 1965. His first job with the California legislature was on the staff of Assemblyman Robert W. Crown. In 1986, Lockyer graduated with a J.D. from University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law. Lockyer began his own political career as a member of the San Leandro Unified School District school board.
Legislative career Lockyer first won a State Assembly seat in a special election in 1973, following the accidental death of his political mentor, Bay Area Assemblyman Robert W. Crown. He served in the legislature for the next twenty-five years, more than half of that time in the state senate, where, in 1994, his peers chose him President Pro Tem, the most powerful position in the upper legislative house.
As a legislator, Lockyer won close friends in both political parties, including Jim Brulte, Republican minority leader of the state senate, who would long remember Lockyer's skill at compromise and consensus-building,""What Ails California? What Went Wrong?", Travers Conference in Ethics and Accountability, UC Berkeley, January 4, 2010 and Democratic Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown, who recalled that, by the time Lockyer left the legislature in 1998, "Capitol insiders took his prolific effectiveness for granted.""Experts expound", Capitol Weekly, July 16, 2009
Environmental protection legislation and the Bay Trail Lockyer considered his greatest environmental achievement to be his 1987 bill to create a Bay Trail.In campaign literature, Lockyer called this "one of the most far-sighted contributions to the San Francisco Bay Area" which he envisioned as an eventual 500-mile-long hiking and cycling path, a continuous recreational corridor, with adjacent bayshore parks and protected natural habitats, that would entirely encircle San Francisco and San Pablo Bays. Requiring city, county, and regional cooperation, the Bay Trail marked its 20th year in 2009, with 293 miles open to hikers, bicyclists, joggers, and walkers.Jason Sweeney, "Lockyer bill remembered as Bay Trail turns 20", Hayward Daily Review, June 4, 2009
1984 "hate crimes" legislation In 1984, Lockyer sponsored the State's first "hate crimes" legislation which, as later amended, provided that "no person...shall by force or threat of force, willfully injure, intimidate, interfere with, oppress, or threaten any other person in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him or her by the Constitution or laws of this state or by the Constitution or laws of the United States because of the other person's race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender, or sexual orientation, or because he or she perceives that the other person has one or more of those characteristics." Later, as attorney general, Lockyer coordinated enforcement of this statute with local law enforcement.
1987 tort reform "napkin deal" On September 10, 1987, while Lockyer chaired the State Senate Judiciary Committee, he and Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown met at Frank Fat's Restaurant in Sacramento with representatives of bitterly competing special interests – insurance companies, trial lawyers, doctors and manufacturers – to formalize their agreement to changes in California's civil liability laws. This compromise had already been worked out; the dinner was meant to ratify a peace pact among all the concerned parties to abide by the compromise. Lockyer, who had acted as mediator during the earlier negotiations, scribbled the terms of the pact on a restaurant cloth napkin, and so ended a political war. The compromise bill was then ramrodded through the assembly and state senate on the last night of that year's legislative session, and was signed into law by Republican governor George Deukmejian.
Though only Lockyer's theatrical touch of writing the agreement on a napkin made it especially memorable, the napkin deal became legendary in the State Capitol. Proudly reproducing the original napkin on a poster titled "Tort-Mania 1987." Lockyer and Brown regarded the special interests compromise and conciliation they had arranged as a great legislative accomplishment. "The public is better served," Lockyer said at the time, "when these groups are trying to mend rather than tear the fabric of society."
1997–98 "Welfare Reform" budget Federal legislation signed by President Clinton in 1996 required all states to enact “welfare-to-work” legislation to help welfare recipients move from government assistance to employment and “self-sufficiency.” The resulting establishment of a new CalWORKs (California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids) program had a major effect on California's budget, propelling difficult negotiations between the Democratic legislature and Republican governor Pete Wilson. As Senate President Pro Tem, Lockyer was a key negotiator in these private negotiations, which, he later recalled to journalist Daniel Weintraub, produced the state's “last... old-fashioned balanced budget.””What Works…”, excerpted from Daniel Weintraub interview with Lockyer, Sacramento Bee, July 12, 2009
State attorney general Elected attorney general in 1998, Lockyer steered the Justice Department toward a new legal activism that reflected his liberal values in areas such as civil rights, antitrust enforcement, and consumer and environmental protection. He became one of the two most prominent state Attorneys General in the nation, rivaled in media attention only by New York's Eliot Spitzer. The two men were personal rivals as well, once nearly coming to blows after "screaming expletives at each other" at a Los Angeles convention of the National Association of Attorneys General.
As attorney general, Lockyer sometimes had to defend official positions he found objectionable, such as asking the courts, in 2004, to invalidate San Francisco same-sex marriage licenses which conflicted with state law, though he personally supported the right of same-sex marriage which brought him under fire from both social conservatives and gay activists. On other occasions, the positions Lockyer defended matched his own, as when he defended California's 1996 legalization of medical marijuana against federal attacks by the Bush Administration. Lockyer found this particularly satisfying as he had come to strongly support "compassionate use" of Marijuana after living through his mother's and younger sister's deaths from leukemia."Medical pot users honor Lockyer", Alameda Times-Star, February 25, 2004
Sex offenders and DNA testing In 1996, the state legislature passed California's version of "Megan's Law", which required authorities to make publicly available registration information provided to local police by former child molesters, rapists, and other sex offenders after being released from custody. But the public could only access this information about registered sex offenders living in their communities by visiting a police station or calling a 900 toll-free number, until Lockyer's department, with legislative approval in 2004, launched a public website allowing Internet users, by a simple search, to find personal details about more than 60,000 past sex offenders, and to locate, through an interactive map, such offenders living in their neighborhoods. The website faced initial complaints that, despite the State's efforts to prod local Police to provide accurate data,"Attorney General Lockyer Unveils Improvements to Megan's Law", March 15, 2002 some of the information was outdated; and that, as the ACLU contended, there were too few restrictions to protect the civil liberties of those who had already completed their sentences. But the website did draw enormous public interest, receiving over 186,000,000 "hits" from more than 16,000,000 individual users in its first year of operation.California Department of Justice, "California Sex Offender Information, 2005 Report to the California Legislature"
Another large-scale bio-tech challenge was expanding State Crime Lab facilities to process DNA samples taken from convicted felons, aiming to create the largest state-run DNA criminal data bank in the country. Since 1988, California law had required blood samples taken from felons convicted of specific sex and violent crimes, in the hope of reinvigorating often “cold” investigations of unsolved crimes. When Lockyer took office, 100,000 of these blood samples sat in cold storage, still waiting to be analyzed and compared to DNA from crime scene evidence. In June 2001, Lockyer announced that with an expanded DNA Lab staff and new equipment, the backlog of unanalyzed blood samples had been eliminated, leading to the identification of suspects in homicide cases more than 15 years old."State's DNA Lab Backlog Eliminated", Attorney General's Office, June 25, 2001
But then a voter-approved measure of 2004 that allowed police to gather DNA, not just from convicted violent criminals, but from anyone arrested, even without charge or conviction, for any felony, led Lockyer himself to express reservations. "I personally wouldn't have put arrests in the measure," he said, adding that he would also have made it simpler for innocent people to get their information removed from the files – a complaint of civil libertarians who raised the specter of innocent people being kept in the same database as convicted armed felons. This also proved an administrative nightmare, as the backlog eliminated in 2001 had reappeared as a new backlog of 287,000 by 2006, forcing new efforts, with inadequate financial resources, to meet the television-viewing public's rising expectations of law enforcement efficiency.
Enron and prison-rape remark controversy As attorney general, Lockyer, during the Enron scandal of 2001, achieved some notoriety for his public quip, "I would love to personally escort [Enron CEO] Ken Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi, my name is Spike, honey'". This remark was widely condemned as an endorsement of prison rape.
Lockyer later apologized for the statement in a letter to the Los Angeles Times, saying, "My anger over the activities of energy barons doesn't come close to my lifelong outrage at the crime of rape. ... I guess I let my anger get the better of me in talking about the mercenary corporate executives who are making life so miserable for millions of Californians."
Landmark legal cases Silveira v. Lockyer (Restrictions on semi-automatic firearms) Lockyer v. Andrade ("Three-strikes" criminal sentencing) Lockyer v. City and County of San Francisco (Same-sex Marriage)
2003 gubernatorial recall election
An initiative to recall newly re-elected Governor Gray Davis qualified for the ballot in July 2003, with a special election scheduled for October to include both a referendum on the recall itself and a list of candidates vying to replace Davis if the recall succeeded. With some arm-twisting by U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, all the potential Democratic candidates, including Lockyer, agreed not to run, in the hope that this would strengthen Davis' campaign to defeat the recall.