Newsom Wipes Out 548 ‘Racist, Inhumane’ Death Sentences With One Letter

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday he will commute every death sentence in the state to life in prison without the possibility of parole, wiping out the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere with 548 people on it, 529 men and 19 women, according to ABC7.

In a letter he shared with the announcement, Newsom said he was using his “constitutional clemency authority” and that “state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us.” Presumably the diminishment of the victims was less incompatible.

He called it one of the most difficult decisions of his career and wrote, “I alone bear responsibility for this decision and its impact,” while acknowledging it will resurface painful memories for victims’ families.

The commutations are not final for most of the condemned. The state constitution requires California Supreme Court approval to grant clemency to anyone convicted of a felony more than once, which ABC7 reports applies to 382 of the 548 cases, about 70%. The other 166 do not need the court’s sign-off.

Nobody has been executed in California since Clarence Ray Allen at San Quentin on Jan. 17, 2006, as KTVU notes, and Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions in 2019. Voters upheld the death penalty at the ballot box in 2012 and again in 2016, which is the heart of the objection from prosecutors. 

San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said voters rejected a repeal in 2016 and told KTVU, “I don’t think that’s democracy at work.”

Victims’ groups were harsher. 

Topo Padilla of Crime Victims United said, “We are absolutely disgusted” by the move and suggested it was driven by political ambition, and Patricia Wenskunas, founder of Crime Survivors, called the decision “offensive” and “outrageous.” 

The California District Attorneys Association did not immediately comment, but in a letter to Newsom last month its president, Jeannine Pacioni, warned that to “simply erase all those judgments with the stroke of a pen” would be “a profound disservice” to justice.

The ACLU praised the move. 

Executive director Anthony Romero called the death penalty “racist, error-prone, and inhumane.” 

Newsom adviser Dan Newman answered critics by saying, “Life without parole is hardly leniency.”

The timing is the political story. 

Newsom leaves office in January after eight years and is weighing a presidential run, and the decision clears the biggest death row in the hemisphere in one stroke. Per ABC7, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown granted broad clemency to death row prisoners in 2022, and in 2024 President Joe Biden commuted 37 of the 40 federal death sentences.

Among those affected, KTVU lists Richard Farley, who killed seven people in a 1988 Sunnyvale shooting, Robert Fairbanks, convicted in a 1985 killing of a San Francisco State student, and Yosemite killer Cary Stayner.

What happens next is up to the state’s top court, and then to the next governor. Xavier Becerra, who takes over in January, has said he will extend the state’s death penalty moratorium, per ABC7.