Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that he is commuting every death sentence in California, all 548 of them, to life in prison without parole. It is the largest mass commutation in American history.
The scale is hard to overstate. California held the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere, 529 men and 19 women, more than a quarter of everyone condemned in the country. One move cuts the national death row population by nearly 30 percent, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. California has not executed anyone since 2006, and Newsom froze executions entirely with a moratorium in 2019.
Not all of it is final today. About a third of the commutations take effect on Newsom’s own authority. The rest, 382 people convicted of more than one felony, need sign off from the California Supreme Court, where at least four of the seven justices have to agree, according to the Associated Press. Newsom sent those cases to the court on Thursday.
“State sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes all of us.”
Gavin Newsom, in an open letter to Californians, November 5
The move does not take the death penalty off the books. Prosecutors can still seek it in new cases, and California voters chose to keep it in 2012 and 2016. What changed is the fate of the people already sentenced to die: they will die in prison instead.
The timing lands, too. Newsom announced it on a day when Indiana carried out an execution in the early morning hours and Alabama and Florida had executions scheduled, according to USA Today. His own term ends in January, and Reuters notes he is expected to chase the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.
However anyone scores the politics, the fact stays simple. California’s death row is gone, and it went with one letter.
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Featured photo: Charles Ommanney, Office of the Governor of California, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain