Gov. Gavin Newsom is moving to empty California’s death row entirely, announcing plans to commute the sentences of 548 condemned prisoners in what stands as the largest act of clemency in American history.
The decision, confirmed Thursday, marks the first time the state’s death row population would be fully cleared since California carried out hangings in the late 1800s. The inmates affected represent more than a quarter of all death row prisoners nationwide, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
For Newsom, a longtime opponent of capital punishment, the move caps years of incremental steps away from executions. In 2019, shortly after taking office, he imposed a moratorium on executions and later had the execution chamber at San Quentin dismantled — a decision that came just three years after California voters rejected a ballot measure to abolish the death penalty and instead approved one meant to speed up executions. At the time, Newsom said he could not in good conscience be responsible for another person’s death.
“After nearly 30 years in public life, I have come to understand the limits of what government can justly do,” Newsom wrote in an open letter released Thursday addressed to “all Californians.” “I am taking this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundation of our legal system, and diminishes us all.”
The announcement, long expected, has drawn sharp criticism from victims’ rights groups, who argue it overrides the judgment of juries, judges and voters who have upheld the death penalty over the years.
“I don’t think he or anyone else should be overturning a jury’s verdict and a judge’s sentencing because of his personal beliefs or feelings,” Topo Padilla, president of Crime Victims United, said last week.
Since 2024, death row itself has largely become symbolic. Male inmates were moved out of their individual cells at San Quentin and dispersed among 24 other state prisons, while 20 women once sentenced to death were integrated into the general population at the Central California Women’s Facility that same year.
Newsom inherited a prison system far different from the one overseen by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose administration carried out California’s last executions — Tookie Williams in 2005 and Clarence Ray Allen in 2006. Under Newsom, the state’s incarcerated population has shrunk dramatically. He has ordered the closure of five prisons, including a facility in Norco that shut down in October, and has converted San Quentin into what is now called a rehabilitation center.
Newsom’s successor, Governor-elect Xavier Becerra, has pledged to continue the execution moratorium once he takes office. The timing of Newsom’s announcement coincides with renewed national debate over capital punishment, fueled in part by a botched execution attempt in Tennessee and a suggestion from the Trump administration that executions could be televised.
Clemency on this scale is not without precedent — former President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of 40 federal death row inmates in 2024 — but Newsom’s action is being described by death penalty researchers as unprecedented in its size and scope.
The announcement also comes as Newsom weighs a possible run for president once his term ends later this year. Paired with other high-profile stances, such as his early embrace of same-sex marriage as San Francisco mayor in 2004, the decision could bolster his standing among progressive Democrats as a bold policy leader — while drawing backlash from moderates, conservatives and advocates for tougher crime policies.
Anti-death penalty organizations have already released an advertisement quoting Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and praising Newsom’s decision as “rooted in justice, guided by conscience and made with courage.” Dan Newman, a Democratic strategist who works with those groups and also advises Newsom, said the governor made the decision independently of his political team and was unaware the ad existed before its release.
Most of Newsom’s commutations will require court approval. For nearly 400 inmates convicted of multiple violent felonies, at least four of the seven California Supreme Court justices must sign off before the sentences can be reduced.
Anne Marie Schubert, a former prosecutor who now leads the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, vowed her organization would challenge the commutations before the state Supreme Court. She said victims’ families were not notified in advance.
“I find this appalling, disrespectful, and the most grotesque violation of victims’ rights I have ever seen,” Schubert said. “There are 548 people on death row. That means 548 families who have been shattered by what these people did to their loved ones.”
Newsom said those receiving commuted sentences will not be eligible for the parole board’s newer sentence review and commutation procedures — an attempt to address concerns raised by prosecutors, victims’ advocates and death penalty supporters that inmates could eventually seek release.
“These offenders will die in prison, but not by our hand,” Newsom wrote.
In his letter, Newsom called the decision one of the hardest of his career — not because he doubts its necessity, but because he recognizes it may reopen wounds for victims’ families. He said that after years of meeting with those families, he considered commuting only some sentences, but ultimately concluded that selectively granting clemency “would inadvertently create two classes of murder victims: those whose killers deserve death, and everyone else.”
California has not executed anyone since Schwarzenegger left office. Natasha Minsker, former director of the ACLU of California’s Center for Advocacy and Policy, said capital punishment has largely faded from the state’s political conversation. “I’m struck when I talk to lawmakers and ask them to oppose the death penalty, and they tell me we don’t have the death penalty in California,” she said.
Mary McComb, California’s former state public defender, said her opposition to capital punishment took root early in her career, during her first case defending a man with an intellectual disability facing a capital charge.
“You can always hope, but without commutations, there’s no guarantee that future governors will have the courage to continue a moratorium,” McComb said.
A University of Miami study examining California death sentences from 1987 to 2019 found that defendants most likely to receive the death penalty were Black or Latino individuals convicted of killing white victims. The study also found that racial disparities persisted across the state’s counties, though some counties’ juries were far more likely than others to hand down death sentences.
Riverside County, according to the study, accounts for a disproportionate share of the state’s death sentences.
“While the raw percentage differences described here are small given how rare death sentences are, the magnitude of geographic disparities between counties is striking and clearly points to several racially biased death-sentencing hot spots, especially in Riverside County,” wrote the study’s author, Nick Petersen.
That research, along with other studies identifying racial disparities in capital sentencing, was cited by the state public defender’s office in a 2024 petition asking Attorney General Rob Bonta to halt the state’s pursuit of death sentences and executions. Newsom himself filed a brief supporting that effort.
“California is not immune to the pernicious influence of racial bias in the application of the death penalty,” Newsom wrote in that 2024 filing. “The nation’s capital punishment system is inextricably linked to the legacy of slavery and racial terror.”
Newsom’s commutations will touch some of California’s most notorious criminal cases, including Richard Allen Davis, whose 1993 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas shocked the Bay Area; Charles Ng, convicted of killing 11 people in the Sierra Nevada foothills during the 1980s; and Scott Peterson, whose murder of his pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, in Modesto became a national tabloid sensation.
In an interview before the announcement, Polly Klaas’ father, Marc Klaas, said the prospect of commutation weighed heavily on him. Davis abducted Polly during a sleepover with friends in Petaluma and strangled her. He had a lengthy criminal record, and the case helped usher in an era of tougher sentencing laws, including California’s “three strikes” legislation.
Though Klaas said he had long given up hope that Davis would ever actually be executed, he held onto the belief that he and others convicted of similarly heinous crimes would remain on death row for life.
“It’s so discouraging,” Klaas said. “It makes me feel terrible and brings back all my personal feelings.”
Davis’ case is among those Newsom is submitting to the state Supreme Court for review.
Polly’s sister, however, expressed a different view. In a statement released Thursday, Jess Nichol said she once believed Davis deserved to be executed but has since come to see that his death would not aid her own healing or improve public safety.
“The system tells survivors that execution is important for our healing. It isn’t. It’s a distraction from what we actually need,” Nichol said.
Original source: CalMatters
