Gavin Newsom is on his way out as California’s governor and apparently decided to leave behind one last parting gift, for murderers. On his way out the door, Newsom commuted the death sentences of all roughly 550 inmates sitting on California’s death row, converting every single sentence to life without the possibility of parole.
Newsom framed it in the kind of lofty language only a career politician could deliver with a straight face. I have decided to exercise my constitutional clemency authority to commute all California death sentences to life without the possibility of parole,” he said. “I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us.” California values. Right. The same state that keeps voting to keep the death penalty on the books.
This is being called the largest mass commutation in modern American history, wiping out nearly 30 percent of the entire U.S. death row population in a single stroke. Newsom’s California death row commutation affects some of the worst criminals imaginable, people convicted of multiple murders, the killing of children, and other heinous crimes. These are not jaywalkers who caught a bad break.
Here’s the kicker. California hasn’t actually executed anyone since 2006. Newsom himself already slapped a moratorium on executions back in 2019 and went ahead and dismantled the death chamber at San Quentin. So the state spent decades and billions of dollars running the largest death row in the country, holding trials, letting juries hand down death verdicts, and then one governor decided on his own that the whole thing was morally wrong. California voters, by the way, have repeatedly rejected efforts to abolish the death penalty and even approved measures to speed executions up. Newsom just shrugged and did it anyway.
Some of the commutations still require California Supreme Court approval because of prior felony convictions, but Newsom is pushing them through regardless. The commutations are permanent. These offenders stay locked up for life with no shot at parole, so at least there’s that small mercy for victims’ families.
It’s the kind of move that tells you everything about how the left sees government power. Voters say one thing, juries spend years delivering verdicts, and a governor heading for the exit simply overrules all of it because his feelings changed. California spent untold billions keeping these cases alive in court and then handed the whole exercise over to one man’s conscience on his last lap around the track.
Newsom will no doubt tout this as a bold moral stand as he eyes whatever political ambitions he has left. What it actually looks like is a governor who spent nearly 30 years in office deciding, right at the end, that all those jury verdicts were just suggestions. California deserves better than this, and so do the victims and their families who sat through those trials.
