California mom rips Newsom-backed 'diversion program' that appears to benefit her son's killer
A California mother discovered that killing her son in a car crash counts as less than shoplifting under Gavin Newsom’s laws, and the driver may soon have her record erased entirely.
Allison Lyman’s son Connor Lopez died on a San Diego motorcycle when Harkit Kaur, 50, turned directly into his path last April. Eyewitnesses saw it; Kaur failed no sobriety test. Yet California treated the death as a misdemeanor and now offers her a diversion program signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that can make the arrest “never occurred.”
Lyman sat in the DA’s office and heard the phrase “diversion program” for the first time. Then she learned Newsom had approved AB 3234 in 2020, expanding judges’ power to dismiss misdemeanor charges after completion of court-ordered programs. The consequence, Lyman says, is drivers “right back on our roads.” She has already seen Kaur behind the wheel.
That 2020 statute works alongside AB 2167, signed in 2023, which orders courts to weigh “alternatives to incarceration”, diversion, restorative justice, probation, before any jail time. Lyman watched another Sacramento widow endure the same judge citing Penal Code 17.2 and the same preference for leniency. Vehicular manslaughter, under these rules, lands lighter than shoplifting.
State Sen. Roger Niello’s SB 953 would force every such fatality onto the DMV’s radar, slapping two points on the driver’s record regardless of diversion. “Under current laws, a speeding ticket can now have a greater reflection on a driver’s record than killing somebody with a car,” Niello said this week. The bill cleared committee unanimously Tuesday.
Lyman has spent the year since her son’s death lobbying for that modest reform. The DMV, she and Niello argue, cannot decide who poses a risk if fatal crashes vanish from the official ledger. Newsom’s office did not respond to questions about the outcome that leaves grieving families watching their loved one’s killer drive away with a clean sheet.
The deeper failure is the deliberate layering of soft-on-crime statutes that treat road deaths as non-violent technicalities. One year after Connor Lopez was killed, his mother is still explaining to lawmakers that erasing the record does not erase the fatality.
Original reporting: Fox News.
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