SACRAMENTO — Susan Oliver had enough of California.

Pain cut deep after her husband, Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Danny Oliver, died in the line of duty on Oct. 14, 2014. She watched his murderer yell hundreds of profanities, blow her kisses and call law enforcement cowards in Sacramento Superior Court.

Oliver, her two daughters she had with Danny and their family endured the emotionally taxing trial to see justice meted out. Killer Luis Monroy Bracamontes received the stiffest penalty in April 2018: the death sentence. Bracamontes shot Oliver, 47, in the head amid a crime spree through two counties that began at a Motel 6 in Sacramento and ended in Auburn with another Placer County sheriff’s detective also killed.

But the justice Oliver sought evaporated the following year, she said. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who supported a proposition seeking to repeal the death penalty, implemented a moratorium on capital punishments in 2019. Oliver decided to leave California for Montana after his decision, feeling that the Golden State let her down.

“I endured a lot,” Oliver said. “Mentally, I was not in a good place after that.”

For victims’ families, watching a jury hand down the death penalty offers an affirmation that they understand the pain their loved one endured, families said in interviews. But their reactions to the death penalty can vary — especially as loved ones and inmates remain in limbo over delays in carrying out executions.

Some families reacted with outrage when President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of inmates on federal death row on Dec. 23; others had implored him to take the executive action.

Newsom halted killings because he said it does not act as a deterrent and discriminates against inmates who are indigent, people of color or mentally ill.

“The intentional killing of another person is wrong and as Governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual,” Newsom said in his message announcing the executive order. “Our death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure.”

Though California has not executed any inmates since 2006, district attorneys still pursue the punishment in sentencing egregious crimes. This year, Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office pursued it against Adel Ramos, a man who in 2019 killed Sacramento police officer Tara O’Sullivan amid an hourslong standoff with law enforcement in North Sacramento.

Prosecutor Jeff Hightower announced Dec. 20 he would seek the death penalty again for Ramos after a jury deadlocked this month.

For Karen Johnson, watching her late husband’s killer receive the death sentence meant he got what he deserved.

“A sense of relief came over me,” she said. “A ton of bricks … just fell off of me. I felt light.”

Aaron Dunn shot and killed 46-year-old Jon Johnson, a local cameraman, and another man while they enjoyed a night out with their families in Elk Grove in March 2006. After, Dunn also engaged in a shootout with law enforcement officers.

Karen Johnson was unsure, however, about the death penalty when prosecutors informed her that they elected to pursue it. She wondered what her husband would have wanted but she also sought justice. Johnson wanted to ensure Dunn did not leave prison.

A separate trial is held after a defendant has been convicted of murder to determine their sentence. Prosecutors have the sole discretion to seek capital punishment. In the penalty phase of a trial, a jury must either sentence a murderer to death or life without the possibility of parole.

In the end, Johnson said she left the jurors’ outcome to God. And when jurors did vote unanimously for the capital punishment, relief washed over her.

“I felt like all the anger from the time it happened, all the way to the trial, which was four years later, was just … in the blink of an eye, in the twinkling of an eye, it was all gone.”

Johnson said she would have accepted it if Dunn had received a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Though, she said if she were honest with herself, she would have wanted him to be sentenced to death row.

Still, almost 19 years later, Johnson said she doesn’t know exactly where she stands on the death penalty because it involves the death of another person.

The siblings of Linda Canady echoed similar sentiments but their opinions about capital punishments have since evolved.

Thirty-five-year-old Canady was abducted in December 1985 from the Arden Fair shopping center parking lot, raped, killed and dumped in an irrigation ditch near the Arizona border on Christmas Eve. Jeffery Lee Hronis and John Anthony Bertsch were each sentenced in December 2000 to death.

Carolyn Canady said her oldest sister’s killers getting the ultimate punishment validated that their actions were heinous.

“It was the beginning of the closure process,” Carolyn Canady said.

Brother David Canady agreed, and added he was was looking for Hronis and Bertsch to have the most miserable lives in prison.

“That was way more important to me than specifically the death penalty,” David Canady said, referring to both men never leaving prison.

But David added he was looking for jurors to affirm the highest penalty offered by the criminal justice system — he’s not sure if he would have been happy if jurors instead granted for life without parole.

Both siblings said that they have hesitations about the death penalty. For Carolyn, she’s unsure if society should be putting people to death.

For David, he’s concerned about the high costs to execute an inmate rather than keep them locked up forever.

These hesitations, however, did not exist for them 15 years ago, they said.