Opinion: Newsom's death row clemency is just — and still not enough

On his way out of the governor's office, Gavin Newsom did something no state chief executive in American history has done at this scale: he commuted every death sentence in California at once. In a signed open letter released November 5, Newsom converted the sentences of all 548 people on the state's death row — 529 men and 19 women, according to reporting from ABC7 San Francisco — to life without the possibility of parole. It is a defensible decision, grounded in two decades of California's own evidence against its death penalty. It is also, on close reading of Newsom's own letter, an act that resolves the fate of 548 individuals while leaving the actual argument about capital punishment exactly where it was.

A Governor's Last Act

Newsom's reasoning was direct. "State-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California's values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us," he wrote. He traced the decision to the moratorium on executions he imposed on March 13, 2019, which he said only formalized a de facto halt in place since 2006, the last year the state executed anyone. For nearly twenty years, then, California maintained the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere while refusing to use it — a contradiction Newsom's letter calls, without much argument needed, untenable.

The action is not as simple as a single signature. Under the clemency process described on the governor's own site, the California Constitution requires state Supreme Court approval before a governor can commute the sentence of anyone twice convicted of a felony — which, per ABC7's count, covers roughly 382 of the 548 cases, about 70 percent. Those commutations are not yet in effect; the court must now take up what Newsom's letter calls a "unique inter-branch constitutional process" that the justices did not choose and, he acknowledges, "may personally disagree" with. For most of the 548, Thursday's letter was a request, not a final act.

The Case the State Already Made Against Itself

What makes the commutation hard to dismiss as pure gesture is how much of the argument for it comes from California's own institutions rather than from Newsom's convictions alone. The state has executed 13 people since capital punishment was reinstated in 1978, according to figures reported alongside NPR's coverage of the announcement, while sentencing hundreds more to a punishment never carried out. Eight people sentenced to death in California have been exonerated — all men of color, per the Death Penalty Information Center's account of the state's record, compiled in its report calling this the largest mass clemency grant in U.S. history. State corrections data has tracked a death row population that has been shrinking for years through deaths, resentencing and attrition rather than resolution — not through the system working, but through it simply running out the clock.

The financial case is just as uncomfortable for defenders of the status quo. When voters considered repealing the death penalty in 2012, the Legislature's nonpartisan fiscal analyst — not an advocacy group, but the state's own Legislative Analyst's Office — projected that replacing it with life sentences would save roughly $100 million annually in the near term, rising to about $130 million a year as the backlog of capital appeals cleared. Voters rejected that measure anyway, 51.95 percent to 48.05 percent, and in 2016 narrowly passed Proposition 66, meant to speed up executions by shortening appeals. It produced zero executions. The pattern across a decade of ballot measures is consistent: Californians have twice chosen, by thin margins, to keep capital punishment on the books while doing nothing that makes it function.

"As Governor, I alone bear responsibility for this decision and its impact, just as I alone would bear responsibility for each execution."

What the Commutation Doesn't Settle

Newsom's letter is candid about the limits of what he is doing, in a way that undercuts any reading of this as abolition by another name. "I recognize the limits of this clemency action, which does not repeal the death penalty," he wrote, "and is limited to commuting California's current death sentences. The power to repeal the death penalty rests with the Legislature and voters. The discretion to seek, impose, and uphold death sentences in individual cases remains, as ever, in the hands of prosecutors, juries, and courts." That sentence is the whole problem in miniature. Prosecutors can keep seeking death sentences in California tomorrow. Juries can keep imposing them. And the next governor — or Newsom himself, hypothetically, were the clock turned back — would be under no obligation to commute anything.

Opposition has been sharp and specific, not reflexive. Patricia Wenskunas, founder of the victims' advocacy group Crime Survivors, told ABC7 the decision was "offensive" and "outrageous," saying "my heart hurts for every one of the victims." The California District Attorneys Association, whose president Jeannine Pacioni had written to Newsom last month warning of "grave concerns," argued that erasing jury verdicts at the stroke of a gubernatorial pen "would be a profound disservice to the administration of justice." These are not frivolous objections. Death sentences in California were imposed by juries following the procedures voters have twice affirmed; a single executive, however principled, overriding hundreds of those verdicts in one afternoon is a significant concentration of power, even in service of an outcome with a strong factual basis. The ACLU's Anthony Romero called it the end of "a racist, error-prone, and inhumane punishment" — and he is not wrong about the record — but the mechanism by which that record gets addressed matters, especially in a state where voters have been asked the direct question and answered no.

An Unfinished Reckoning

Newsom is not the first governor to grant clemency to an entire death row; Oregon's Kate Brown commuted the state's 17 death sentences in December 2022, and Colorado's Jared Polis spared three men in 2020 alongside a legislative repeal. What distinguishes California is scale and sequence: this is roughly thirty times Oregon's death row, and it arrives with no accompanying repeal, no ballot measure, no legislative vote — just one term-limited executive's reading of a system he says cannot be fixed. President Biden took a narrower version of the same approach in December 2024, commuting 37 of 40 federal death sentences specifically to keep the incoming Trump administration from carrying them out, a decision explicitly about timing and political survival. Newsom's letter, to its credit, does not pretend to that kind of tactical urgency; it reads as a genuine reckoning with a system he calls, after three decades in public life, a demonstrated failure.

But a reckoning that stops at commutation and declines to touch the sentencing statute leaves California exactly where it has been for twenty years: a state that will keep producing death sentences its governors keep promising never to enforce. Nationally, this single action cuts the U.S. death row population by nearly 30 percent, leaving roughly 1,388 people under death sentence nationwide — the fewest since 1984, according to tracking cited by the Death Penalty Information Center. That is a genuine inflection point in the practice of American capital punishment. It is not, however, a resolution of the question California's own voters have twice been asked and twice answered ambiguously. Newsom's successor, Xavier Becerra, has said he will continue the execution moratorium, which suggests the de facto arrangement — sentence freely, execute never — will persist into a third decade. The honest next step is not another governor's letter. It is forcing the Legislature, or the voters directly, to decide whether California wants a death penalty it will actually use, or whether it is time to stop asking juries to hand down a sentence the state has, in practice, already abolished.