Daniel Wozniak was sentenced to death in 2016 for one of the coldest, most calculated double murders I’ve ever covered — a struggling community theater actor who killed two people to bankroll his own wedding. Nearly ten years later, that death sentence is still technically on the books. But death row, the place, is gone.

I covered the murders of Sam Herr and Julie Kibuishi in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 14. When the book was published, Wozniak was at San Quentin State Prison, his execution indefinitely on hold under Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2019 moratorium. The chapter ended with the assumption that he would simply stay there. He hasn’t.

In July 2021, Wozniak was quietly moved out of San Quentin and into Salinas Valley State Prison — a lower-security facility — as part of a pilot program for condemned inmates. He was later transferred again, to a state prison in Vacaville. The program allows death-sentenced prisoners to leave their isolated cells, hold prison jobs, and put a portion of their earnings toward victim restitution.

Then the entire system was dismantled. Beginning in February 2024, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation started emptying San Quentin’s death row — once the largest in the country — and folding condemned inmates into the general population at prisons across the state. By the end of May 2024, the unit stood empty. Its tiers of cells are being repurposed as Newsom converts San Quentin into a rehabilitation center.

Wozniak is still, legally, a condemned man. His sentence has not been overturned, and his automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court remains unresolved. In April 2026, the court granted his attorney yet another extension to file it. But in every practical sense, a punishment that a jury handed down in record time has quietly softened into something closer to an ordinary life sentence.

For Sam Herr’s father, Steve, the transfer news landed hard. He told the Orange County Register that he heard about his son’s killer’s improved circumstances not from prison officials, but from one of Wozniak’s own acquaintances. “It was a kick in the stomach,” he said.

It’s a familiar ache in cases like this one. A jury delivers the harshest sentence the law allows, the families steel themselves for the long fight to see it carried out — and then the ground shifts beneath them. Wozniak will never walk free. But the death sentence that was meant to define his punishment has, for now, become little more than a line on paper.