Gov. Gavin Newsom has effectively emptied California’s death row, announcing Thursday that he is commuting the death sentences of 548 condemned prisoners — the largest single act of clemency in American history and a move that touches more than a quarter of all death row inmates nationwide.
The decision marks the first time since the state’s 19th-century hangings that California will have no one formally sentenced to die. For Newsom, a longtime death penalty opponent who halted executions shortly after taking office in 2019 and later dismantled San Quentin’s execution chamber, it represents the culmination of a yearslong campaign against capital punishment — and one of the most consequential and controversial acts of his governorship.
“After nearly 30 years in office I have come to understand the limits of what government can justly accomplish,” Newsom wrote in an open letter released Thursday. “I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us.”
The move drew immediate backlash from victims’ advocates, who argue it overrides the judgment of juries, judges and voters who have repeatedly upheld the death penalty at the ballot box. Topo Padilla, president of Crime Victims United, said earlier this week that no governor should unilaterally undo sentences “because of his personal beliefs or feelings.”
Anne Marie Schubert, head of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation and a former Sacramento County prosecutor, said her organization intends to challenge the commutations before the California Supreme Court, arguing that victims’ families were never consulted. “There’s 548 people on death row,” she said. “That’s no less than 548 families that have been destroyed by what these people have done to their loved ones.”
Most of the commutations will require judicial sign-off. For prisoners convicted on multiple felony counts — nearly 400 of the total — at least four of the seven California Supreme Court justices must approve the change.
Newsom emphasized that none of the affected inmates will be eligible for new parole board resentencing provisions, meaning they will remain in prison for life. “These offenders will die in prison but not by our hand,” he wrote.
The governor acknowledged the emotional weight of the decision, saying he had considered sparing only some inmates from commutation but ultimately rejected that approach. Distinguishing between cases, he wrote, “would inadvertently create two classes of murder victims — those whose perpetrators deserve the death penalty and then the rest.”
California’s death row had already become something of an abstraction in recent years. In 2024, male death row inmates were moved out of their isolated cells at San Quentin and dispersed among two dozen other facilities, while the 20 women under death sentences were integrated into the general population at the Central California Women’s Facility. The state has not actually executed anyone since 2006, when Clarence Ray Allen was put to death under then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Stanley “Tookie” Williams was executed the year before.
Newsom’s successor, Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra, has said he intends to continue the execution moratorium once he takes office. The announcement also arrives amid renewed national debate over capital punishment, following a botched execution in Tennessee and remarks from the Trump administration floating the idea of televised executions.
The timing has fueled speculation about Newsom’s political future as he weighs a possible presidential run after leaving office at year’s end. Much like his decision as San Francisco mayor in 2004 to recognize same-sex marriages before it was legal statewide, this latest move could burnish his reputation among progressives as a leader willing to take bold, controversial stances — while giving ammunition to critics on the right.
An advocacy group opposing the death penalty has already released an ad invoking the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., calling Newsom’s decision “rooted in justice, guided by conscience and made with courage.” Democratic strategist Dan Newman, who works with those groups and also advises Newsom, said the governor’s political team had no role in the decision and that Newsom was unaware the ad was being produced.
Research has long pointed to racial disparities in how California’s death penalty has been applied. A University of Miami study examining death sentences handed down between 1987 and 2019 found that Black and Latino defendants convicted of killing white victims were the most likely to receive capital punishment, with notable geographic disparities — Riverside County among them. Study author Nick Petersen described the county as one of the state’s clearest “racialized death sentencing hotspots.”
Those findings formed the basis of a 2024 legal petition filed by the state public defender’s office urging Attorney General Rob Bonta to halt pursuit of the death penalty altogether. Newsom filed a brief supporting that effort, writing at the time that “California is not immune from the invidious influence of racial bias in its application of the death penalty” and that the nation’s capital punishment system remains “inextricably linked to the legacy of slavery and racial terror.”
Among those whose sentences will be commuted are some of California’s most infamous killers: Richard Allen Davis, convicted of kidnapping and murdering 12-year-old Polly Klaas in Petaluma in 1993; Charles Ng, convicted in the torture-killings of 11 people in the Sierra foothills during the 1980s; and Scott Peterson, convicted of murdering his pregnant wife, Laci, in a case that captivated the nation.
Marc Klaas, Polly’s father, said before the announcement that the prospect of commutation left him deeply shaken. “I was still secure in my mind that he and the rest of them would be on death row for the rest of their lives,” he said. “It’s so discouraging. It makes me feel terrible and it regurgitates all my personal feelings.”
His daughter Jess Nichol, Polly’s sister, offered a different perspective, saying in a statement that she once believed Davis’ execution was necessary but has since concluded otherwise. “The system tells survivors that execution matters to our healing,” she said. “It doesn’t. It’s a distraction from what we actually need.”
Original source: CalMatters
