Newsom Announces Commutation of 548 California Death Row Sentences

Gavin Newsom did not discover, on Thursday, that 548 people on California’s death row were each undeserving of the sentence a jury gave them. He did not sit with 548 records of doubt, misconduct, or disproportion and extend mercy where mercy was earned. He abolished the death penalty by signature, for every condemned murderer in the state, and then offered an explanation so inverted it should be studied.

Selecting only some inmates for clemency, he said, would create unequal treatment of murder victims. Read that again. The governor’s solution to unequal treatment of the murdered is to make sure none of their killers keeps the sentence jurors imposed. Equality, in this usage, means the family of a slaughtered child and the family of a serial killer’s last victim receive the same official message: the verdict you endured was a formality, and honoring it would have been unfair.

That is not moral seriousness. It is an insult with a press release attached.

California voters have already had this argument. They kept capital punishment on the books. They rejected repeal. They backed an effort to make the system function rather than abolish it. For more than twenty years the state has refused to carry out executions anyway, and since 2019 Newsom has maintained an executive moratorium. A pause is an evasion. A blanket commutation is something else. It permanently deletes the sentence. A future governor who believed the law meant what it said could not restore what this act erases. Governor-elect Xavier Becerra has already promised the moratorium continues. The political class has decided. Juries may keep deliberating if it makes them feel useful.

District attorneys who say they will still seek death in eligible cases are describing the farce exactly. The statute remains. The special-circumstances trials will still be fought. The appeals will still be financed. And everyone in the courtroom will know the ending, because the governor has announced that the punishment is illegitimate and that applying it to anyone would disrespect the victims of everyone else. You can call that many things. Honest government is not one of them.

There were honest paths. Persuade the public. Pass a repeal. Put the question back on the ballot and live with the answer. Argue, as serious opponents of the death penalty do, that the risk of executing an innocent person, the endless appellate maze, and decades of non-enforcement have made California’s death penalty a cruel legal fiction. Parts of that critique are real. Conservatives who oppose capital punishment because the state botches the gravest power it claims are not soft-headed. They are having the argument where it belongs: in the law, not through the back door.

What Newsom did instead was take the cases where the moral claim for death is hardest to wave away — serial killings, the murder of children — and fold them into a mass erasure of the sentence. Not because each record demanded it. Because distinction itself offended him. Mercy that cannot tell a child killer from a doubtful conviction is not mercy. It is ideology refusing to look.

Victims’ relatives objected and were treated as an inconvenience to a higher consistency. Prosecutors noted that the law has not changed. They are right, and that is the scandal. California will keep a death penalty it will not impose, spend the money it claims to be saving, and instruct the families of the murdered that their particular grief was an inequality in need of correction.

A society that cannot carry out its most serious sentence should repeal it in daylight. A governor who will not defend that sentence, and will not ask voters to end it, has chosen the third way. That way is contempt: for juries, for the ballot, and for the dead — equally distributed, so that no one can accuse him of playing favorites.