Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that he plans to change every death sentence in California to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. It would be the largest clearing of a death row in modern American history, and roughly one in three of the people it reaches is Black, in a state where Black residents are about 6% of the population.
The governor’s office released a letter to Californians on the death penalty on Nov. 5. The Marshall Project counted 548 people covered by the commutations. Other recent counts of California’s death row run higher, near 563, and the exact figure will come from the paperwork that follows. Newsom leaves office in January.
The disparity is the heart of the case against the system. Research cited by CalMatters found Black defendants in California are up to 8.7 times more likely to be sentenced to death than others convicted on similar charges. Newsom has said as much himself: “California’s capital punishment scheme is now, and always has been, infected by racism.”
There is documented proof of how that happens. An Alameda County District Attorney’s investigation found prosecutors there systematically kept Black and Jewish people off juries because they were perceived to oppose the death penalty. Twenty defendants from those cases have since received new sentences.
The commutations are not final. Under California law, a governor cannot grant clemency to a person with more than one felony conviction unless at least four justices of the state Supreme Court recommend it. That covers more than half of the people on death row, so the court now holds the decision for hundreds of cases.
Opponents say the move spares some of the state’s most notorious killers. The California Police Chiefs Association has argued it extends mercy to them while sidelining the judgment of juries and the suffering of victims’ families. Those families are owed a hearing, and their pain is real. But life without parole is not release. Nobody on death row walks out because of this, and the sentence that replaces execution still keeps them in prison until they die.
California has held an execution moratorium since 2019. What the moratorium left in place was a waiting room, filled by a process this governor now calls racist. Ending the sentences is the least the state owes the people it sorted that way.
The justices have not said how fast they will move. Newsom’s term ends in January.
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