Gov. Gavin Newsom just spared the lives of every single person on California's death row, 548 prisoners in all, in the largest mass commutation of death sentences in modern American history. He did it two months before leaving office, while openly weighing a run for president, and while a strategist who advises both him and the groups paying for the victory-lap ad campaign explained that Democrats must now 'show what we're for.' Subtle.
548 Sentences, One Pen
Let's start with the scale, because it is genuinely staggering. California has more people on death row than any other state, and Newsom's action wiped out roughly one-fourth of all death sentences nationwide. Every one of them is now life in prison without parole.
Newsom, per The New York Times, framed it as a moral decision. In an open letter to Californians, he wrote that "state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California's values, undermines the foundations of our legal system and diminishes each of us." He added that the state cannot execute people "in our imperfect legal system and remain true to our core values, first among them justice and human decency."
He is not the first governor to empty a state's death row. He is, by a mile, the first to do it with a row this big. The previous record was 167, set by Illinois Governor George Ryan in 2003. Newsom did it with the population of a small town.
The Timing Is Doing a Lot of Work
Look at the calendar. Newsom acted roughly two months before his term ends, and he is widely understood to be considering a 2028 presidential bid. A move like this thrills liberal primary voters and hands Republicans a ready-made attack ad for a general election. Everybody involved knows this.
The activist machinery is already humming. Death penalty opponents have planned a national ad campaign praising the decision as an act of courage inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., Dolores Huerta and Robert F. Kennedy. The minute-long spot will air on dozens of news and political shows. That is not a grassroots afterthought. That is a rollout.
The man behind part of it is Dan Newman, a Democratic strategist who advises both Newsom and the anti-death penalty groups sponsoring the ad. Newman insists the governor was driven by personal conviction. Fine. Maybe he was. It can be both. It usually is, in politics. But when the guy advising the governor and the guy running the ad campaign are the same guy, you do not get to act surprised when people raise an eyebrow.
The Families Who Never Got a Vote
Here is where this gets hard, and where we are not going to pretend otherwise. Marc Klaas, whose 12-year-old daughter Polly was kidnapped from her home and murdered in 1993 by Richard Allen Davis, is livid. "We're talking about serial killers, spree killers, cop killers, baby killers," he said. "We're talking about absolutely the worst people in our society, without a doubt. And he's putting his energy into commuting these characters?"
He said the idea "regurgitates the horrible emotions" and leaves him "raw and angry." He was upset when Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions seven years ago. This is the sequel nobody asked for.
Anne Marie Schubert, a former Sacramento district attorney who now leads the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, sent Newsom a seven-page letter with photos of victims and detailed descriptions of their deaths. Among them: an 8-year-old boy tortured for months before he died in 2013, and another 8-year-old who vanished walking home from school in 1996. She says families were given "some sense of finality through the justice system" and that “that is all being reopened and rehashed.” Those are real people with real grief, and no amount of moral philosophy makes that go away.
Not Every Victim's Family Agrees
It would be easy to tell this as a simple story of mercy for monsters versus the grieving. It is messier than that. Jess Nichol, Polly Klaas's stepsister, met with Newsom at San Quentin in October, the same prison that once housed Davis, and urged him to commute every sentence.
Nichol was the same age as Polly. She said she first believed her sister's killer deserved to die. Then something changed. "We used to think that having a vengeful death penalty sentence is going to be what gave us justice," she said. "We've discovered that it doesn't."
So the same family is split. One side of a murdered girl's family is enraged. Another is grateful. Nobody gets to claim the victims speak with one voice, and anyone who tells you they do is selling something.
The Lawsuit Is Already Loaded
Now for the legal fight, which is coming whether Newsom likes it or not. Opponents are expected to argue that a blanket commutation violates the law and that each case must be weighed on its own merits. Schubert has said flatly that she plans to sue.
The key wrinkle is California law. A governor can unilaterally grant clemency to someone convicted in only one felony case. For prisoners with convictions in multiple felony cases, the California Supreme Court has to approve. More than half of the sentences Newsom just reduced fall into that second bucket and now need court review. A court spokeswoman declined to say how long that could take.
Schubert argues the justices must examine every case individually. Other legal experts say the court could handle them en masse if the clemency rests on a moral objection to the death penalty itself. David Carrillo of Berkeley's California Constitution Center wrote in 2024 that when a governor is moved to be merciful, "the courts recognize that's between the governor and the Almighty." We are about to find out how far that theory stretches.
The Dingo Take
The people with the most to lose from this are the families who sat through trials, testified, and were told it was over. Marc Klaas is not a talking point. He is a father who buried his twelve-year-old and has now watched a governor reopen the wound for the second time in seven years. You can believe the death penalty is barbaric, and plenty of serious people do, and still admit that the way this was done lands on those families like a slap.
And then there are the 548 men and women whose lives were just spared, some of whom did things that are genuinely unspeakable. Mercy that only extends to the sympathetic is not mercy. It is a popularity contest. Newsom is right that the system is imperfect, and that the state should not be in the business of killing its citizens. That is a defensible moral position, and a lot of the world agrees with him.
But let's not insult anyone's intelligence about the choreography. The ad is planned. The strategist is quoted. The timing is two months before he walks out the door and into a presidential exploratory phase. Do the right thing and get credit for it, sure. Just don't ask us to pretend the credit wasn't part of the plan. The courts will now decide whether one man's conscience can erase a quarter of the nation's death sentences with a single pen stroke. Buckle up.
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