The loudest objection to Gavin Newsom's mass commutation is that he has overridden jurors and voters. It is also the weakest, because overriding verdicts is what clemency is. The framers of California's constitution gave governors that power precisely so that someone accountable could say a punishment, though lawfully imposed, should not be carried out. Newsom did not seize a power. He used one he was handed.
The objection also comes from a movement that has little standing to make it. The same Right that now invokes the sanctity of jury verdicts cheered when Donald Trump emptied federal prisons of January 6 defendants whom juries and judges had convicted. Nobody on that side announced that the rule of law had been desecrated. Mercy, it turns out, is fine when it flatters your own team.
Now the voters. Californians rejected repeal in 2016, 53 to 47, a narrow margin on a ballot crowded with competing measures. That same year they approved a measure to speed up capital cases. Nine years later, the system is no faster, and the state has not executed anyone since 2006. The voters were promised a working machine. They got a warehouse. Hundreds of people have aged on death row while the state spent enormous sums litigating sentences it never intended, and probably never could, carry out. Call it what it is: a death penalty in name, and life imprisonment in practice, with extra cost and extra cruelty.
That cruelty also falls on victims' families, and the strongest case against Newsom deserves a direct answer. Many of them were told that a death sentence meant justice would arrive. Instead they have been hauled through hearings, appeals and headlines for decades, waiting on an execution that every informed person knew was not coming. Life without parole is a sentence the state can actually deliver. It gives them finality, which the death penalty in California has not given anyone for nearly twenty years. If you care about victims, the lie is what you should be angry about, not its retraction.
Then there is the thing prosecutors rarely want to discuss: the machine's error rate. Nearly two hundred people nationwide have been exonerated after sitting on death row. Capital juries are selected to be more willing to convict. Defendants with weak lawyers and poor resources are disproportionately the ones sentenced to die, and race shapes who is charged with capital crimes and whose victims are deemed to matter most. A punishment that cannot be undone should require a system that does not make mistakes. This one does not exist, anywhere.
None of this makes Newsom a hero. The Left should be clear-eyed about what he did and what he left undone. A commutation is not abolition. The statute remains on the books, and Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman has already signaled that prosecutors will keep pursuing capital cases. A future governor, or a future prosecutor, can restart the cycle. Newsom spent years on a moratorium and a gesture while the Legislature, controlled by his own party, never sent him a repeal bill to sign. Democrats with supermajorities preferred to leave the hardest vote to a governor's pen. And a politician with national ambitions and a closing term is not exactly taking a risk when he acts at the last responsible moment.
But timing and motive are secondary to the result. Five hundred and forty-eight people will no longer wait for the state to kill them. The state will no longer pretend that its machinery of death functions, and the cost of keeping that pretense alive can finally be named and counted.
The next step belongs to the people who applaud today. Put repeal in front of voters again, with the honest accounting of cost, error and delay that was missing in 2016. If the death penalty is as indefensible as Newsom says, it should not depend on one governor's conscience. It should be dead because the law says so.
