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Gov. Gavin Newsom is reportedly considering commuting the sentences of the 563 people condemned to death row in California prisons, as public opinion has shifted in the week since a Tennessee female prisoner survived a botched execution by lethal injection.
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Newsom, who is term-limited, has discussed with his advisors reducing death row inmates’ sentences to life in prison without parole as one of his final acts in office, according to the New York Times. The outgoing Democratic governor is considering a run for president in 2028.
Newsom first put a moratorium on the death penalty via an executive order he issued in March 2019 shortly taking office earlier that year.
At the time, Newsom called the death penalty “ineffective, irreversible and immoral.” He said it was the end result of a 40-year moral journeyinformed by his Irish Catholic faith and the experience of his foster brother, who was paroled from San Quentin in 1996 after serving time for drug-related offenses.Since then, the once-notorious prison closed its death chamber and Newsom has upheld it as a model of rehabilitation.
“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,” said spokesperson Diana Crofts-Pelayo on Thursday. “He believes the intentional killing of another person is wrong.”
Xavier Becerra, Newsom’s likely successor, has said he would extend the death penalty moratorium, to “continue moving our state away from a costly, flawed system that disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities and too often gets it wrong.”
California has not executed a prisoner since 2006, when San Quentin officials gave a lethal injection to Clarence Ray Allen, a 76-year-old who had been sentenced to death in 1982 for killing three people during a robbery in Fresno. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation did not respond to a request for comment.
The state has the highest number of inmates sentenced to death of any state in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center, an advocacy nonprofit.
A spokesperson for the Office of the State Public Defender, which represents indigent people facing the death penalty, said the agency had no knowledge of Newsom’s plans.
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“We have no insight regarding the governor’s plans, but we would certainly urge him to grant universal clemency as one way to ensure that people sentenced under California’s deeply flawed and racially discriminatory death penalty system are not executed,” said Chief Deputy State Public Defender Christina Spaulding in an email.
A Pew poll from August showed a majority of Americans favored the death penalty for people convicted of murder, though 73% of those polled said there was some risk that innocent people would be sentenced to death.
Last week, Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike survived after prison officials injected her with two rounds of lethal drugs. She was then hospitalized and regained consciousness on Tuesday, setting off a debate about whether Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee should commute her sentence to life in prison without parole.
Lee suspended the death penalty for the rest of the year after the failed executions of Pike and Tony Carruthers, who survived his own botched injection in May.
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 after being convicted of first-degree murder after she and her then-boyfriend tortured and killed a classmate, according to the Tennessee Department of Corrections.
Last year, the Trump administration resumed allowing federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty after former Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a moratorium in 2021.
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon would livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who shot and killed 13 people and injured 32 at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth said of Hasan’s execution, which is scheduled for Dec. 3.
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