Gov. Newsom Weaseling on California’s Death Penalty, Again

After running in 2018 for governor on upholding voter’s support of the death penalty, once elected, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in 2019, shortly after taking office, that he would grant reprieves for all death penalty murderers on California’s death row. He called the death penalty “ineffective, irreversible and immoral.” Newsom then signed an executive order putting a moratorium on the executions of the 737 inmates who were currently incarcerated in California’s death row.

“We cannot advance the death penalty in an effort to soften the blow of what happens to these victims,” Newsom said at the time. “If someone kills, we do not kill. We’re better than that.”

In 2016, California voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have repealed the death penalty, and instead voted to expedite the executions of the inmates currently sitting on death row. Newsom supported the initiative to repeal.

Governor Gavin Newsom substituted his own opinion for the repeated decisions of the state’s voters,” Michael Rushford with the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation said in an interview.

While Gov. Newsom and the state’s Democrat lawmakers continue to dismantle the criminal justice system, top to bottom, poll after poll shows escalating crime is always one of the top issues among  Californians, which is why voters passed Proposition 66 in 2016, reaffirming the state’s death penalty, but also to speed up the appeals process.

Now, following the botched Tennessee execution of murderer Christa Pike, Gov. Gavin Newsom has elevated talks about executions, and even is mulling sparing the lives of all 563 prisoners on death row in California, according to the New York Times.

In a new podcast on “This is Gavin Newsom,” the Governor interviews Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, discussing “How DEI Failed, and Can We Fix America’s Racial Legacy?”

The Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization that works to end mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and racial and economic injustice, posted the podcast on its website titled, “Watch Bryan Stevenson and Gavin Newsom Discuss Our Legacy of Racial Injustice.”

EJI provides legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes. “We are committed to changing the narrative about race in America,” they say.

Newsom, who is clearly trying to improve his national presidential image on race, opens the podcast with Stevenson in Montgomery, Alabama with this word salad: “It’s great to be back here with you, in Montgomery, at a remarkable moment in American history, where I felt compelled to come back down and sort of reconnect with my why. What I am doing in terms of my day job, but what more I can be doing as it relates to the world we’re living in, and love just to start a little bit with that. What world are we living in? This moment?”

They both laugh knowingly.

“I mean, you’re the wise man here. You’re the elder here. I need, I need to get some perspective,” Newsom says.

Stevenson says “there’s a huge deficit in our nation about understanding the history of America as it relates to these really core issues. We were never taught it in school. It’s not something that people have been eager to talk about, and I think our ignorance has left us vulnerable, to a lot of narratives that are rooted in fear and anger. And I believe that the politics of fear and anger is a path to decline and destruction and polarization.”

Stevenson then claims that “the politics of fear and anger are prevailing. And there are people in this country who want to govern by making a lot of people afraid, or a lot of people angry. And they know it’s a very effective formula.”

Projection, Mr. Stevenson?

Then he compares today’s American politics of fear and anger “as what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.”

On mass incarceration and the death penalty, Stevenson says “it has to be put outside the reach of elected politics, because its going to be one of those levers that people want to pull.”

“This administration says, ‘Oh, I want to execute.’ They love that spectacle of violence, and that’s why we have to see this beyond the reach of good governance,” Stevenson claims.

He further claims that there are people in this country who would “embrace the Colosseum and gladiators” and “that same spectacle today.”

This is the fellow influencing Gavin Newsom on race, “mass incarceration” and the death penalty.

Newsom is pandering for the black vote. And he’s willing to commute the death sentences of 563 tried and convicted killers and murderers, prisoners on death row in California, to achieve his goal.

There was no discussion of the victims of the 563 prisoners on death row in California.

Stevenson goes on to complain that the Americans with Disabilities Act is enforced in the public and private sectors, “but the one place we don’t enforce it is in the criminal legal system, where you have mandatory sentencing, where judges cannot consider the fact that the person they are being asked to sentence is severely disabled.”

He thinks that “is fundamentally wrong,” conflating the convicted killers with victimhood.

No discussion about the victims of the 563 prisoners on death row in California.

Stevenson claims “using lethal power is like a bad drug, and can be intoxicating.”

I did a search of some of the more notable convicted killers still under death sentences on death row in California, as well as their victims:

• Richard Allen Davis (72): Kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her Petaluma bedroom in 1993 and strangled her. The case helped drive California’s “three strikes” law.
• Isauro Aguirre (46): Tortured and murdered his girlfriend’s 8-year-old son, Gabriel Fernandez, in 2013 in Los Angeles. The case was the subject of the Netflix series The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez.
• Cary Stayner (65): The “Yosemite Killer,” convicted of murdering four women near Yosemite National Park in 1999. The California Supreme Court denied a death-penalty appeal earlier in 2026.
• Charles Ng: Convicted of 11 first-degree murders in a series of killings with Leonard Lake in the 1980s.
• Joseph Naso (92): The “Alphabet Killer,” sentenced to death in 2013 for the murders of four women whose first and last initials matched, between 1977 and 1994. Investigators linked him to a “list of 10.”
• Wayne Adam Ford (64): Turned himself in in 1998 with a severed breast in his pocket and was convicted of killing four women, dismembering some and dumping remains in waterways.
• Ramon Salcido (65): Convicted of a 1989 Sonoma County killing spree that included his wife, two daughters, and other relatives and a coworker.
• David Carpenter: The “Trailside Killer,” died in prison in 2024, convicted of multiple murders of hikers near San Francisco in 1979–1980; among the oldest people still under a California death sentence.
• Marcus Wesson (80): known as the “vampire king of Fresno,” convicted of killing nine of his children during a 2004 Fresno standoff.
• Randy Kraft (81): known as the Scorecard Killer, is a notorious American serial killer who murdered at least 16 young men between 1971 and 1983, with suspicions of many more victims.

Another long-standing condemned death row inmate is Scott Peterson (54), convicted of murdering his pregnant wife Laci and their unborn son. However, he is no longer under a death sentence: the California Supreme Court overturned it in 2020 over jury-selection issues, and he was resentenced to life without parole.

Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978, California has carried out only 13 executions.