{"id":462029,"date":"2026-09-12T23:20:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T23:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/462029\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T23:20:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T23:20:13","slug":"california-has-one-quarter-of-all-the-nations-death-sentences-will-newsom-commute-them-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/462029\/","title":{"rendered":"California Has One-Quarter Of All The Nation\u2019s Death Sentences. Will Newsom Commute Them All?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Santa Barbara Independent\u00a0republishes stories from\u00a0CalMatters.org<\/a>\u00a0on state and local issues impacting readers in Santa Barbara County.<\/p>\n

In 2019, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the state\u2019s death penalty system a failure and\u00a0issued an executive order<\/a>\u00a0halting executions. His order \u2014 and the sight of the lethal injection gurney and the gas chamber chair\u00a0being driven away<\/a>\u00a0from San Quentin State Prison \u2014\u00a0left the impression that capital punishment in California was all but dead.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is not: There are 546 men and 18 women who could still face execution in the state. While some states have gotten rid of the death penalty, and others carry out regular executions, California has ended up with a bloated, dysfunctional system that satisfies virtually nobody. A standoff between aggressive local prosecutors who keep pursuing death sentences and more liberal statewide leaders has led to two decades without an execution and a colossal backlog of appeals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Newsom prepares to leave office in January, he is facing calls from advocates in California and\u00a0international human rights groups<\/a>\u00a0to commute all of the state\u2019s death sentences, allowing hundreds of people to spend the rest of their lives in prison rather than face execution should a pro-death penalty candidate ever become governor. It\u2019s a once-in-a-career opportunity for Newsom: Such a mass commutation would have a profound effect on capital punishment in the United States, slashing the total number of people under a death sentence across the country by more than a quarter. It would vastly outstrip similar moves by other governors and even President Joe Biden, who commuted 37 death sentences on his way out of office.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unlike Biden, Newsom can\u2019t act on his own: The California Supreme Court would have to approve commutations for people with multiple felony convictions (more than half of the relevant cases). But the bigger dilemma for Newsom is political, given that he is widely expected to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2028.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Newsom declined to answer questions about commutations. Spokesperson Diana Crofts-Pelayo wrote in an email, \u201cGovernor Newsom has been clear about his position on the death penalty since his first year in office, when he ordered a moratorium on executions. He believes the intentional killing of another person is wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Marshall Project and CalMatters reviewed data on 9,000 U.S. death sentences and found inequities in California dating back 50 years. Newsom himself decried some of those same problems in statements throughout his time as governor. California courts have exonerated or resentenced a much smaller share of people to lesser punishments \u2014 such as life without parole \u2014 than other states. Death sentences are more common among Black and Hispanic people, and are largely driven by district attorneys in particular counties, not just by the severity of a crime.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Right before Newsom became governor, he\u00a0told CalMatters<\/a>\u00a0in response to a question about the death penalty that he\u2019d asked his predecessor, Jerry Brown, to \u201csolve this.\u201d Brown didn\u2019t, and so now Newsom is in the same position, with a difficult choice that could backfire regardless of the decision he makes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

California\u2019s share of death sentences climbs dramatically<\/p>\n

No California governor has granted clemency to a person on death row since Ronald Reagan in 1967. In the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court\u00a0forced states across the country<\/a>\u00a0to rewrite their laws governing death penalty trials and appeals, and the sentence returned to California in 1977. Over the next five decades, the state\u2019s prosecutors convinced juries to sentence more than 1,000 people to death, but state officials carried out only 13 executions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That gap can partially be explained by politics: Largely Republican counties vote for district attorneys who pursue death sentences, but executions are the province of governors, who have a more Democratic electorate.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite legal challenges and Newsom\u2019s moratorium, some counties have continued to pursue death penalty cases. More than 200 people have received a death sentence in California since the state\u2019s last execution in 2006.<\/p>\n

California voters narrowly defeated two ballot propositions, in\u00a02012<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a02016<\/a>, that would have ended the death penalty outright. Another proposition in 2016 aimed to speed up executions by shortening the appeals process, but\u00a0did not provide adequate funding for defense lawyers to handle all the cases<\/a>. Amid this back-and-forth, the ballooning number of death sentences meant cases sat for years without resolution, even as they sapped the state budget.<\/p>\n

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The state spends around $200 million per year on legal costs in capital cases, even as most people facing execution are waiting to get a lawyer, according to a\u00a02025 report by the Habeas Corpus Resource Center<\/a>, which represents people in death penalty appeals. The cost to provide lawyers in every capital case would likely total more than half a billion dollars.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Without executions and relatively few successful appeals, California\u2019s share of the number of people nationwide with death sentences has climbed dramatically over the decades, and today it has more people with such sentences than any other state.<\/p>\n

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Newsom has been outspoken against the death penalty for many years, pointing to racial disparities, the high cost of trials and appeals, and the risk of executing innocent people.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2022, he\u00a0signed a new law<\/a>\u00a0making it easier for people in prison whose cases were affected by racial bias to seek to have their sentences overturned. He\u2019d previously\u00a0said in a statement<\/a>, \u201cCalifornia\u2019s capital punishment scheme is now, and always has been, infected by racism.\u201d Over the next few years, the Alameda County District Attorney\u2019s Office mounted a massive investigation into capital cases going back to the 1980s, finding that in many of them, local prosecutors had systematically kept Black and Jewish people off juries because they were perceived to oppose the death penalty. Twenty of these defendants have since been given new sentences, and at least two of those are\u00a0seeking millions in civil lawsuits<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the same time, a coalition of civil rights groups has claimed in a lawsuit that racial disparities in death sentences violate the state constitution. Earlier this year, the California Supreme Court ordered a lower court in Sacramento to evaluate the arguments, which rely on a\u00a0series of studies<\/a>\u00a0finding that Black people are up to 8.7 times more likely to be sentenced to death than others convicted on similar charges and that Latino people are up to 6.2 times more likely to receive a death sentence than others in similar cases.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Newsom has also expressed a common concern over the death penalty\u2019s geographic arbitrariness: Receiving a death sentence depends less on the nature of the crime than on the likelihood that particular district attorneys will choose to pursue the punishment. A Marshall Project and CalMatters analysis found that since 1987, when the state began tracking county-level homicide data, someone who committed a homicide in Riverside County was four times more likely to receive a death sentence than if they\u2019d committed the crime in neighboring Los Angeles County.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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At least 25 people have received death sentences since Newsom\u2019s moratorium, with 11 of them in Riverside County. District attorneys can continue to pursue new capital cases unless voters repeal the death penalty in a referendum.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The office of Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin did not respond to a request for comment. But in the past, he\u2019s voiced support for local decision-making.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCriminal justice policy should as much as possible reflect the community, because it\u2019s a personal thing,\u201d he told\u00a0The Sacramento Bee in 2016<\/a>. More recently, Hestrin, a Republican, has put out statements arguing the\u00a0governor\u2019s moratorium<\/a>\u00a0\u201csubverted the express will of the people\u201d and \u201copened fresh wounds for murder victims\u2019 families.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hestrin\u2019s comments are a preview of what awaits the governor should he commute a large number of death sentences, particularly if he runs for president. Some of those peoples\u2019 crimes could provide easy fodder for attack ads, like Richard Allen Davis, who killed 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993. Her father, Marc Klaas, has been a\u00a0prominent critic of Newsom\u2019s moratorium<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe does, I think, have to consider how it would look in other parts of the country were he to grant clemency,\u201d said Garry South, a longtime California political strategist who worked on Newsom\u2019s first gubernatorial campaign in 2008. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t want to create an issue, even a phony issue where his opponents leading up to 2028 could demagogue in the rest of the country and claim he let killers out on the street of his own home state.\u201d (If Newsom only commutes the death sentences, then nobody will be released from prison. They will serve life without parole.)<\/p>\n

On the other hand, he could grant clemency to men whose innocence claims have numerous supporters. One of those is Kevin Cooper, who was sentenced to death for a 1983 quadruple murder in Chino Hills. Celebrities from\u00a0Kim Kardashian<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0Nicholas Kristof<\/a>\u00a0have backed Cooper\u2019s claims that he was framed by San Bernardino County law enforcement, which local officials have denied. Newsom ordered DNA testing, which did not definitively settle the case. An outside review by a law firm reaffirmed Cooper\u2019s guilt but in turn faced accusations of bias and other shortcomings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Death penalty experts said Newsom doesn\u2019t have enough time to review individual cases, suggesting he will go all or nothing on the clemency question. Biden, by contrast, granted clemency to 37 people but did not for three people convicted in high-profile mass killings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Opponents of the punishment argue commuting death sentences could help Newsom in a crowded presidential primary race. \u201cThe voters he needs to appeal to for a Democratic primary would see this as a bold, positive move, and they want people to act based on their values, who don\u2019t seem like politicians,\u201d says Natasha Minsker, a former ACLU lawyer who lobbies against the death penalty in the state.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If Newsom doesn\u2019t move to grant clemencies, he\u2019ll leave the mess of the California death penalty to the next governor. Frontrunner Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, supported the punishment when he was the state\u2019s attorney general, but he has said he would\u00a0extend the moratorium<\/a>\u00a0if elected. His opponent, Republican Steve Hilton, has said he\u00a0would rescind the moratorium<\/a>, even as he personally opposes the death penalty. So it\u2019s unclear whether executions would return, and when.<\/p>\n

If Newsom chooses not to act, he would leave both sides of the debate unsatisfied, as hundreds of death penalty cases remain without resolution.<\/p>\n

For the record: An earlier version of this story misstated the role prosecutors play in death sentences. Prosecutors seek the death penalty in criminal cases, and juries make the decision to sentence people convicted of capital crimes to death.<\/p>\n

This story originally appeared on\u00a0CalMatters.org<\/a>, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.<\/p>\n

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