Newsom Seeks Commutations on All California Death Sentences to Life in Prison w/o Parole

In an open letter to Californians, Governor Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that he is commuting the death sentences of all 548 convicts on California’s death row, to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“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 all of us,” Gov. Newsom said.

After running for governor on a vow to uphold California voters’ support of the death penalty, Gov. Newsom announced in March 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.”

“We cannot advance the death penalty in an effort to soften the blow of what happens to these victims,” Newsom said. “If someone kills, we do not kill. We’re better than that,” the Globe reported in 2019.

In 2016, California voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have repealed the death penalty, and instead voted to expedite the executions of the inmates currently sitting on death row.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

This is the largest mass commutation of death sentences in U.S. history and would reduce the national death-row population by a quarter to nearly 30% (depending on final court approvals). 

Newsom said the mass commutation of all 548 death sentences to life without parole as a moral, ethical, and practical decision based on long-held views.

Newsom wrote that “many Californians feel that those who commit brutal crimes deserve to die. But as Governor, I have concluded the state cannot morally kill them.” He described life without parole as “the most severe punishment I can lawfully impose and the state of California can ethically enforce,” and said the offenders “will die in prison but not by our hands.”

While Gov. Newsom is using his constitutional clemency powers, he has substituted his own personal opinion for the repeated decisions of the state’s voters.

“The people have voted for the death penalty eleven times since 1972, including three times in the last seven years,” said Criminal Justice Legal Foundation Legal Director Kent Scheidegger in 2019. “The Governor’s decision to grant a blanket reprieve to prevent executions is an abuse of power and a slap in the face of the families of murder victims.”

About one-third of the commutations can take effect immediately by Newsom’s order, but roughly two-thirds of the cases require a recommendation from a majority of the California Supreme Court if they involve multiple felony convictions.

California has not carried out an execution since 2006, when Clarence Ray Allen who was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison on January 17, 2006. He had been convicted in 1982 of arranging the 1980 murders of three people at a Fresno-area market while already serving a life sentence for an earlier killing.

When Gov. Newsom imposed the moratorium in 2019, he ordered the dismantling of the execution chamber at San Quentin. Only 13 executions have occurred since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978. 

“With the stroke of a pen, Governor Newsom has disregarded the decisions of hundreds of jurors and judges, and the anguish of families who lost loved ones to the worst crimes imaginable,” said Jeannine M. Pacioni, President of California District Attorneys Association (CDAA) and Monterey County District Attorney. “These sentences were not handed down lightly. Ordinary Californians sat through weeks of harrowing testimony, weighed the evidence and carried the enormous responsibility of deciding an appropriate punishment. Today, the Governor has substituted his personal beliefs for all of those judgments. The victims were never given a commutation. Their families were never given a choice. They deserve far better than this.”

CDAA noted that the Governor acted without providing prosecutors or victims’ families meaningful advance notice or an opportunity to be heard.

“The Governor acknowledges in his own letter that this decision will reopen painful wounds for victims’ families. Yet he made this sweeping decision without giving those families or the prosecutors who represented them an opportunity to weigh in,” said Greg Totten, Chief Executive Officer of CDAA. “These families have endured unimaginable loss, participated in years of court proceedings and placed their faith in our justice system. They deserved more than learning through a public announcement that the sentences imposed on their loved ones’ killers were being overturned.”