California is home to a quarter of all death row inmates in the United States, and as Gov. Gavin Newsom prepares to leave office in January, he faces mounting pressure from advocacy groups to commute every death sentence in the state before he goes.
Back in 2019, Newsom halted executions statewide with an executive order, a move underscored by the dismantling of San Quentin’s lethal injection gurney and gas chamber. That decision left many Californians with the impression that capital punishment here was essentially over. It wasn’t. Today, 546 men and 18 women remain on California’s death row, caught in a system that satisfies almost no one — too broken to carry out executions, yet too politically fraught to be dismantled.
That standoff stems largely from a divide between tough-on-crime district attorneys in conservative counties who continue to pursue death sentences and a more liberal state leadership unwilling to carry them out. The result has been two decades without a single execution and a backlog of appeals that keeps growing.
Now, with his term ending, Newsom is facing calls from California activists and international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, urging him to commute all death sentences before leaving office. Doing so would convert those sentences to life without parole, protecting inmates from execution even if a future governor supports resuming the practice. It would also be one of the most consequential moves of Newsom’s political career — a single act that would reduce the nation’s death row population by more than a quarter, dwarfing similar clemency actions taken by other governors, and even eclipsing President Joe Biden’s decision to commute 37 federal death sentences before leaving the White House.
Unlike Biden, however, Newsom can’t act entirely on his own. Because more than half of the relevant cases involve inmates with multiple felony convictions, the California Supreme Court would need to sign off on those commutations. And looming over the entire decision is politics: Newsom is widely expected to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, and a decision this large carries risk no matter which direction he takes.
Newsom’s office declined to answer direct questions about his plans. Spokesperson Diana Crofts-Pelayo said in a statement that the governor has “been clear about his position on the death penalty since his first year in office, when he ordered a moratorium on executions. He believes that intentionally killing another person is a reprehensible act.”
An analysis by The Marshall Project and CalMatters of roughly 9,000 death sentences imposed nationwide found troubling patterns in California stretching back half a century — patterns Newsom himself has criticized during his time in office. Compared with other states, California courts have exonerated or reduced sentences for a much smaller share of death row inmates. Death sentences here fall disproportionately on Black and Latino defendants, and whether someone receives such a sentence often has more to do with which county prosecutes the case than with the severity of the crime itself.
Just before taking office, Newsom told CalMatters that he had asked his predecessor, Jerry Brown, to “solve this problem.” Brown never did. Now Newsom finds himself facing the same dilemma — one where any decision carries political consequences.
No California governor has granted clemency to a death row inmate since Ronald Reagan did so in 1967. After the U.S. Supreme Court forced states nationwide to overhaul their capital punishment laws in the 1970s, California reinstated the death penalty in 1977. Over the following five decades, prosecutors persuaded juries to sentence more than 1,000 people to death, yet the state has carried out only 13 executions.
That gap is largely a product of California’s political geography. Conservative counties elect district attorneys who pursue capital cases aggressively, but the authority to carry out executions ultimately rests with governors, who answer to a statewide electorate that leans considerably more Democratic.
Even with legal challenges and Newsom’s moratorium in place, some counties have continued sending new capital cases through the courts. More than 200 people have been sentenced to death in California since the state’s last execution in 2006.
Voters narrowly rejected two separate ballot measures, in 2012 and 2016, that would have abolished the death penalty outright. A third measure, also on the 2016 ballot, sought to speed up executions by shortening the appeals process, but it failed to provide adequate funding for defense attorneys to handle the caseload. Amid this tug-of-war, the number of unresolved capital cases has swelled for years, straining the state budget in the process.
California now spends roughly $200 million annually on legal costs tied to capital cases, even though most death row inmates are still waiting to be assigned an attorney, according to a 2025 report from the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, which represents people appealing death sentences. Providing legal counsel to every person currently on death row would likely cost the state more than half a billion dollars.
With no executions taking place and few successful appeals, California’s share of the nation’s death row population has climbed dramatically over the decades. Today, more people sit on death row in California than in any other state.
Newsom has long been an outspoken critic of capital punishment, citing racial disparities, the enormous cost of trials and appeals, and the risk of executing innocent people.
In 2022, he signed legislation making it easier for incarcerated people whose cases were tainted by racial bias to challenge their sentences. He had previously stated that “California’s death penalty system is, and has always been, infected by racism.” In the years since, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office conducted an extensive review of capital cases dating back to the 1980s and found that prosecutors had systematically excluded Black and Jewish jurors from many of those trials, deeming them unsympathetic to the death penalty. Twenty defendants from those cases have since been resentenced, and at least two are now pursuing multimillion-dollar civil lawsuits.
Meanwhile, a coalition of civil rights groups has filed suit arguing that racial disparities in death sentencing violate the state constitution. Earlier this year, the California Supreme Court directed a lower court in Sacramento to examine those claims, which draw on research showing Black defendants are up to 8.7 times more likely than others to receive a death sentence for similar crimes, and Latino defendants up to 6.2 times more likely.
Newsom has also raised concerns about the geographic randomness of who receives a death sentence — noting that outcome often hinges less on the crime itself than on which county’s district attorney chooses to pursue capital punishment. An analysis by The Marshall Project and CalMatters found that since 1987, when the state began tracking county-level homicide data, someone who committed a killing in Riverside County was four times more likely to be sentenced to death than someone who committed a similar crime in neighboring Los Angeles County.
At least 25 people have been sentenced to death since Newsom’s moratorium took effect, 11 of them in Riverside County. District attorneys remain free to pursue new capital cases unless California voters abolish the death penalty through a future ballot measure.
Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin’s office did not respond to a request for comment. In the past, however, Hestrin has defended local control over such decisions, telling The Sacramento Bee in 2016 that “criminal justice policy should reflect the community as much as possible, because it’s personal.” More recently, Hestrin, a Republican, has argued that Newsom’s moratorium “subverted the express will of the people” and “reopened fresh wounds for the families of homicide victims.”
Those kinds of statements offer a preview of the political backlash Newsom could face if he commutes a large number of death sentences, particularly if he runs for president. Some of the underlying cases could easily become fodder for attack ads — among them Richard Allen Davis, convicted of murdering 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993. Her father, Marc Klaas, has been a vocal critic of Newsom’s moratorium.
“I think he has to consider how this would look in other parts of the country if he granted clemency,” said Garry South, a longtime California political strategist who worked on Newsom’s first gubernatorial campaign in 2008. “He doesn’t want to create a problem — even a false one — that lets his opponents in 2028 claim he let murderers loose in his own state.” Notably, commuting a death sentence wouldn’t release anyone from prison; those affected would instead serve life without the possibility of parole.
On the other hand, Newsom could also choose to grant clemency to inmates whose claims of innocence have drawn significant public support. One such case is Kevin Cooper, sentenced to death for a quadruple murder in Chino Hills in 1983. High-profile supporters, including Kim Kardashian and columnist Nicholas Kristof, have argued that Cooper was framed by San Bernardino County law enforcement — an accusation local authorities have repeatedly denied. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing in the case, but the results were inconclusive. An outside legal review commissioned by the state reaffirmed Cooper’s guilt, though that review itself drew criticism over questions of bias and other shortcomings.
Experts on capital punishment note that Newsom likely doesn’t have enough time left in office to review every case individually, suggesting his final decision may come down to an all-or-nothing choice. Biden, by contrast, granted clemency to 37 people but declined to do so for three inmates convicted in high-profile mass killings.
Opponents of the death penalty argue that a sweeping commutation could actually help Newsom in a competitive Democratic presidential primary. “The voters he’ll need to win over in a Democratic primary would likely see this as a bold, principled move,” said Natasha Minsker, a former ACLU attorney who now lobbies against capital punishment in California. “They’re looking for candidates who act on their values instead of just playing it safe politically.”
If Newsom chooses not to act, the unresolved question of California’s death penalty will fall to his successor. Democratic frontrunner Xavier Becerra, who supported capital punishment during his time as state attorney general, has said he would extend the current moratorium if elected governor. His Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, has said he would lift the moratorium despite personally opposing the death penalty. That leaves the future of executions in California uncertain, regardless of who wins.
And if Newsom leaves office without taking action, he will hand off an unresolved and deeply contentious issue — with hundreds of death penalty cases still in limbo, and neither side of the debate satisfied.
Original source: CalMatters
