Newsom Moves to Spare All 548 on Death Row Two Days After the Midterms.

Governor Gavin Newsom told Californians on Thursday that he will commute every remaining California death sentence — all 548 — to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He announced it two days after the midterms.

“I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundation of our legal system, and diminishes each of us,” Newsom wrote in a letter to Californians. “I know we cannot execute people in our imperfect legal system and remain true to our core values, first among them justice and human decency.”

His explanatory statement to the California Supreme Court says the same unconditional commutation applies to every condemned person: life without parole. Restitution orders stay. The death sentence alone is wiped.

382 need the Court. Under article V, section 8 of the California Constitution, the governor must get a recommendation from the state Supreme Court — at least four justices concurring — before commuting anyone with more than one felony conviction. Newsom’s filing covers those 382. The rest he can commute on his own authority. The Los Angeles Times put the condemned at 529 men and 19 women.

California has not executed anyone since 2006. Newsom imposed a moratorium in 2019 and ordered San Quentin’s death chamber dismantled. The state’s electorate still kept capital punishment: voters rejected repeal efforts in 2012 and 2016. Newsom’s own letter says so.

“California voters have voted to keep the death penalty on the books and I respect that,” he wrote. “But the Constitution also gave every governor clemency authority, and that power exists for moments when law as applied cannot be squared with justice. For me, this is that moment.”

He waited. The Los Angeles Times reported Newsom “intentionally waited until after the general election on Tuesday” to launch the mass commutation, careful not to elevate a death-penalty fight in the midterms. The move lands in his final months as governor, with a possible 2028 presidential run already in the chatter.

The roster includes some of the most infamous killers in modern California history. Richard Allen Davis kidnapped, raped, and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993. Lonnie Franklin Jr., the “Grim Sleeper,” was convicted of killing women and a teenage girl in Los Angeles. Cary Stayner murdered four women near Yosemite in 1999. Charles Ng was convicted in a Sierra Nevada cabin killing spree. The New York Post walked through those cases Thursday after Newsom’s announcement.

Victims’ families and advocates said they will fight it. Anne Marie Schubert, a former district attorney who leads the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, told the Post her group will challenge the mass commutation in court and that families are “losing sleep” as the cases flood back. Topo Padilla of Crime Victims United said Newsom was “espousing his religious beliefs over the sentence of a jury and a judge, and the will of the voters.”

Phyllis Loya, whose son, Pittsburg police officer Larry Lasater, was murdered by a man sentenced to death, told the Los Angeles Times: “[Newsom] has a heart for criminals, I don’t think he has a heart for victims.”

Rep. Vincent Fong, a Central Valley Republican, said Californians “should be appalled and outraged,” arguing Newsom “waited until two days after the election to overrule 548 death sentence[s]” and that if he believed in the decision “he would have made it while voters could weigh in.”

Newsom called the decision “among the most difficult” of his career because it “may surface excruciating memories for victims’ families,” then framed the mass commute as mercy: “We can now let these offenders die in obscurity while we forever remember and honor the victims.”

A Pew Research Center poll in August found about two-thirds of U.S. voters still favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder. California’s death-row population is more than a quarter of the nation’s condemned. Newsom did not put repeal on the ballot. He used the clemency pen after the votes were cast.