SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday commuted every death sentence in his state, converting all 548 of them to life in prison without the possibility of parole in what the Death Penalty Information Center calls the largest mass commutation in American history.
Newsom announced the decision in an open letter to Californians, using the clemency power the state constitution gives the governor. The 548 people — 529 men and 19 women, according to his office — will now die in prison instead of facing execution.
“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,” Newsom wrote.
“As Governor, I alone bear responsibility for this decision and its impact, just as I alone would bear responsibility for each execution,” he wrote.
Not all of it is final with his signature. California’s constitution requires the state Supreme Court to recommend clemency for anyone convicted of more than one felony, and by his office’s count that covers 382 of the 548 — roughly 70 percent. Those commutations wait on at least four justices. The rest take effect immediately.
The order does not repeal the death penalty, and it does not free anyone. California’s death penalty was enacted by the voters themselves, and under state law only the voters can repeal it. They have refused twice, rejecting repeal in 2012 and again in 2016 — the same year they voted to speed up executions. Prosecutors can still seek death sentences in new cases. Newsom’s order reaches only the people already sentenced, and life without parole is the most severe punishment he said clemency allows him to impose.
Newsom halted executions two months into his first term in 2019, saying then that “our death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure.” California has not carried out an execution since 2006. The state has spent an estimated $6 billion on the death penalty since voters reinstated it in 1978 and has executed 13 people in that time, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Thursday’s action cuts the national death row population by nearly 30 percent, to about 1,388 people — the lowest number since 1984.
Victims’ families are not on one side of this, and one family shows it. Richard Allen Davis, sentenced to death in 1996 for kidnapping and murdering 12-year-old Polly Klaas, is among the 548. Klaas’s sister, Jess Nichol, welcomed the commutations. “Whether he’s executed has absolutely nothing to do with my recovery or with real public safety,” she said. Her father, Marc Klaas, has opposed Newsom’s death penalty moves for years.
Prosecutors opposed the blanket move before it happened. The California District Attorneys Association warned the governor in writing that erasing the sentences wholesale would override hundreds of individual jury verdicts. “Every death sentence in California represents an individual case in which a jury heard the evidence, considered the circumstances and determined that the most serious punishment under our law was warranted,” association president Jeannine M. Pacioni said. San Luis Obispo County District Attorney Dan Dow said it in five words: “Justice is always individualized.”
Sandy Friend, whose 8-year-old son Michael Lyons was murdered in 1996, told the Los Angeles Times the commutations are “total disrespect for the victims. It’s a slap in the face.”
The American Civil Liberties Union praised the decision. “These commutations reflect what justice demands: an end to a racist, error-prone, and inhumane punishment that has burdened California for far too long,” ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said in a statement.
Newsom called the decision one of the most difficult of his career because of the memories it will surface for victims’ families. A coalition of victims’ families, prosecutors, former corrections professionals and faith leaders had pressed him to act, and 50 murder victims’ family members signed a letter asking for universal clemency.
The move comes in Newsom’s final weeks in office. He is term-limited and leaves in January, and he is widely expected to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. It also comes five weeks after Tennessee’s attempt to execute Christa Pike failed and she survived the lethal injection, an incident that put the machinery of capital punishment back in the national spotlight.
Ohio is a different story. Ohio has not executed anyone since 2018, as Gov. Mike DeWine has repeatedly delayed executions over the state’s lethal injection drug problems. But every Ohio death sentence is still a death sentence tonight. California’s are not.
