As Gov. Gavin Newsom prepares to exit office in January, he faces mounting pressure over one of the most consequential and politically fraught decisions of his tenure: whether to commute the death sentences of more than 560 people currently on California’s death row, the largest such population in the nation.
Newsom made headlines in 2019 when he ordered a moratorium on executions, calling the state’s capital punishment system a failure. The gas chamber chair and lethal injection gurney were hauled out of San Quentin State Prison in a moment that seemed to signal the death penalty’s demise in California. But the reality is far messier. Some 546 men and 18 women remain under death sentences, and a handful of counties — Riverside chief among them — have continued to pursue capital cases even after the moratorium took effect.
Advocacy groups, including international human rights organizations, are now urging Newsom to commute all of those sentences before he leaves office, converting them to life without parole. Such a move would be unprecedented in scale, reducing the nationwide death row population by roughly a quarter and dwarfing similar clemency actions, including President Joe Biden’s decision to commute 37 federal death sentences before leaving the White House.
Unlike Biden, however, Newsom cannot act unilaterally. More than half of the state’s death penalty cases involve defendants with multiple felony convictions, meaning the California Supreme Court would need to sign off on any commutations. And looming over the entire decision is Newsom’s widely anticipated run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination — a political reality that complicates any move he might make.
Asked directly about the possibility of mass commutations, Newsom’s office declined to answer. Spokesperson Diana Crofts-Pelayo said only that the governor “has been clear about his position on the death penalty since his first year in office” and “believes the intentional killing of another person is wrong.”
A joint investigation by The Marshall Project and CalMatters, examining roughly 9,000 death sentences handed down nationwide, found troubling patterns in California stretching back half a century — many of the same issues Newsom himself has publicly criticized. Compared with other states, California courts have overturned or reduced far fewer death sentences. Black and Latino defendants are disproportionately represented on death row, and prosecutorial decisions by individual district attorneys — rather than the severity of the crime itself — appear to play an outsized role in who receives a death sentence.
Before taking office, Newsom told CalMatters he had asked then-Gov. Jerry Brown to “solve” the death penalty issue. Brown never did, and now the same unresolved dilemma has landed on Newsom’s desk as his time in Sacramento winds down.
A Troubled System’s Deep Roots
No California governor has granted clemency to someone on death row 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. In the decades since, state prosecutors have sent more than 1,000 people to death row, yet only 13 executions have actually been carried out — the last in 2006.
The disconnect stems largely from California’s political geography. Conservative-leaning counties elect district attorneys who aggressively pursue capital cases, while the power to authorize executions rests with governors elected by a far more liberal statewide electorate. Even with legal challenges piling up and Newsom’s moratorium in place, more than 200 death sentences have been issued in California since executions last occurred nearly two decades ago.
Voters have twice rejected ballot measures to abolish the death penalty outright, in 2012 and 2016. A separate 2016 measure aimed at speeding up executions by streamlining appeals failed to provide adequate funding for defense attorneys, worsening an already massive backlog. The result is a system that satisfies almost no one: California spends roughly $200 million annually on capital case litigation, according to a 2025 report from the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, even though most death row inmates are still waiting to be assigned an attorney. Fully staffing every capital case with legal representation could cost more than half a billion dollars.
Because so few sentences are ever carried out or overturned, California’s share of the nation’s death row population has swelled dramatically over the decades — the state now holds more death sentences than any other in the country.
Racial Disparities and Riverside County’s Outsized Role
Newsom has long pointed to racial bias as one of his central objections to capital punishment. In 2022, he signed legislation making it easier for inmates to challenge sentences tainted by racial discrimination. He has previously stated that “California’s capital punishment scheme is now, and always has been, infected by racism.”
That claim gained further weight through a sweeping investigation by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, which examined capital cases dating to the 1980s and found that prosecutors had systematically excluded Black and Jewish jurors believed to oppose the death penalty. Twenty defendants from those cases have since been resentenced, and at least two are now pursuing multimillion-dollar civil lawsuits.
Separately, a coalition of civil rights organizations has sued the state, arguing that racial disparities in capital sentencing violate the California Constitution. Earlier this year, the state Supreme Court directed a Sacramento trial court to review the claims, which cite 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.
Geography plays an equally significant role. A Marshall Project and CalMatters analysis of homicide data since 1987 found that someone who commits a homicide in Riverside County is four times more likely to be sentenced to death than someone who commits a similar crime in neighboring Los Angeles County.
Since Newsom’s 2019 moratorium, at least 25 new death sentences have been handed down statewide — 11 of them in Riverside County alone. District attorneys remain free to pursue capital cases unless voters vote to repeal the death penalty altogether.
Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but he has previously defended local prosecutorial discretion. “Criminal justice policy should as much as possible reflect the community, because it’s a personal thing,” he told The Sacramento Bee in 2016. Hestrin, a Republican, has also criticized Newsom’s moratorium as an action that “subverted the express will of the people” and reopened wounds for victims’ families.
A Political Minefield
Hestrin’s pushback offers a glimpse of the backlash Newsom could face if he moves to commute large numbers of death sentences — particularly as he eyes a national political future. Some cases could become powerful ammunition for critics, including that of Richard Allen Davis, convicted of murdering 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993. Klaas’ father, Marc, has been an outspoken opponent of Newsom’s death penalty moratorium.
“He does, I think, have to consider how it would look in other parts of the country were he to grant clemency,” said Garry South, a veteran California political strategist who worked on Newsom’s first gubernatorial campaign in 2008. “He doesn’t want to create an issue, even a phony issue, where his opponents leading up to 2028 could demagogue in the rest of the country and claim he let killers out on the streets of his own home state.” It’s worth noting that commutation would not release anyone from prison — those affected would instead serve life sentences without the possibility of parole.
At the same time, Newsom could face pressure to grant relief to inmates whose innocence claims have drawn national attention, such as Kevin Cooper, sentenced to death for a 1983 quadruple homicide in Chino Hills. High-profile figures including Kim Kardashian and columnist Nicholas Kristof have championed Cooper’s claims that he was framed by San Bernardino County investigators — allegations local law enforcement has repeatedly denied. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing in the case, but the results did not conclusively resolve the matter, and a subsequent outside review reaffirming Cooper’s guilt has itself drawn criticism over its objectivity.
Legal experts say Newsom likely lacks the time to review each of the roughly 560 cases individually, meaning any clemency decision would probably apply broadly rather than case by case — a stark contrast to Biden’s more selective approach.
Some death penalty opponents argue that a sweeping commutation could actually boost Newsom’s standing in a competitive Democratic presidential primary. “The voters he needs to appeal to for a Democratic primary would see this as a bold, positive move, and they want people to act based on their values, who don’t seem like politicians,” said Natasha Minsker, a former ACLU attorney who now lobbies against capital punishment in California.
Should Newsom decline to act, the decision would fall to his successor. Democratic frontrunner Xavier Becerra, who supported the death penalty during his time as state attorney general, has indicated he would continue the moratorium if elected governor. His Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, has said he would lift the moratorium despite personally opposing capital punishment — leaving the future of executions in California very much uncertain.
Whatever Newsom decides, hundreds of death penalty cases will likely remain unresolved, leaving both supporters and opponents of capital punishment dissatisfied with a system that, for now, shows no clear path forward.
Original source: CalMatters
