Why Newsom Might Commute 564 Death Sentences in CA

In 2019, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the state’s death penalty system a failure and issued an executive order halting executions. His order — and the sight of the lethal injection gurney and the gas chamber chair being driven away from San Quentin State Prison — left the impression that capital punishment in California was all but dead.

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.

As Newsom prepares to leave office in January, he is facing calls from advocates in California and international human rights groups to commute all of the state’s 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’s 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.

Unlike Biden, Newsom can’t 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.

Newsom declined to answer questions about commutations. Spokesperson Diana Crofts-Pelayo wrote in an email, “Governor 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.”

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 — such as life without parole — 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.

Right before Newsom became governor, he told CalMatters in response to a question about the death penalty that he’d asked his predecessor, Jerry Brown, to “solve this.” Brown didn’t, and so now Newsom is in the same position, with a difficult choice that could backfire regardless of the decision he makes.

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 forced states across the country to rewrite their laws governing death penalty trials and appeals, and the sentence returned to California in 1977. Over the next five decades, the state’s prosecutors sentenced more than 1,000 people to death, but state officials carried out only 13 executions.

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.

Despite legal challenges and Newsom’s moratorium, some counties have continued to pursue death penalty cases. More than 200 people have received a death sentence in California since the state’s last execution in 2006.

California voters narrowly defeated two ballot propositions, in 2012 and 2016, that would have ended the death penalty outright. Another proposition in 2016 aimed to speed up executions by shortening the appeals process, but did not provide adequate funding for defense lawyers to handle all the cases. 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.

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 2025 report by the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, 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.

Without executions and relatively few successful appeals, California’s 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.

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.

In 2022, he signed a new law making it easier for people in prison whose cases were affected by racial bias to seek to have their sentences overturned. He’d previously said in a statement, “California’s capital punishment scheme is now, and always has been, infected by racism.” Over the next few years, the Alameda County District Attorney’s 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 seeking millions in civil lawsuits.

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 series of studies finding 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.

Newsom has also expressed a common concern over the death penalty’s 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’d committed the crime in neighboring Los Angeles County.

At least 25 people have received death sentences since Newsom’s 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.

The office of Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin did not respond to a request for comment. But in the past, he’s voiced support for local decision-making.

“Criminal justice policy should as much as possible reflect the community, because it’s a personal thing,” he told The Sacramento Bee in 2016. More recently, Hestrin, a Republican, has put out statements arguing the governor’s moratorium “subverted the express will of the people” and “opened fresh wounds for murder victims’ families.”

Hestrin’s 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’ 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 prominent critic of Newsom’s moratorium.

“He does, I think, have to consider how it would look in other parts of the country were he to grant clemency,” said Garry South, a longtime California political strategist who worked on Newsom’s first gubernatorial campaign in 2008. “He doesn’t 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.” (If Newsom only commutes the death sentences, then nobody will be released from prison. They will serve life without parole.)

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 Kim Kardashian to Nicholas Kristof have backed Cooper’s 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’s guilt but in turn faced accusations of bias and other shortcomings.

Death penalty experts said Newsom doesn’t 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.

Opponents of the punishment argue commuting death sentences could help Newsom in a crowded presidential primary race. “The 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’t seem like politicians,” says Natasha Minsker, a former ACLU lawyer who lobbies against the death penalty in the state.

If Newsom doesn’t move to grant clemencies, he’ll 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’s attorney general, but he has said he would extend the moratorium if elected. His opponent, Republican Steve Hilton, has said he would rescind the moratorium, even as he personally opposes the death penalty. So it’s unclear whether executions would return, and when.

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