California Governor Gavin Newsom is seriously weighing whether to commute the sentences of the hundreds of inmates on death row in the state before leaving office in January, according to a new report. Newsom has been considering the move for months but stepped up conversations with advisers after the failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee last week, The New York Times reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the talks. California, which has the nation’s largest death row population, has not carried out an execution since 2006.
Newsom, a Democrat who has long opposed capital punishment, placed a moratorium on executions in 2019 and ordered the dismantling of California’s death row in 2022. But although other governors have issued mass commutations before, commuting the sentences of all 563 death row inmates in California would mark the biggest clearing of a death row in modern U.S. history. Newsom “has already shown himself to be a leader in the movement to abolish the death penalty,” Austin Sarat, a professor at Amherst College who has written extensively about the death penalty, told Newsweek.
A mass commutation in California would be one of the most important anti-death penalty acts ever taken in American history.” Newsom, who has been floated as a 2028 presidential hopeful, addressed the commutation possibility during a recent episode of his podcast, This is Gavin Newsom. That’s the best they can do,” he said. What do you say?…What do I say to the victims?” Newsweek has contacted Newsom’s office for comment via an email outside regular business hours.
The governor has not announced a decision, but a mass commutation could include clemency for some of the most infamous killers in California’s modern history. Here, Newsweek looks at some of the most notorious inmates currently on California’s death row. Davis, 72, was sentenced to death for the 1993 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas.
Davis kidnapped Klaas from her bedroom in Petaluma at knifepoint and strangled her to death. Klaas’ disappearance sparked a nationwide search. Davis was arrested two months later and led police to her body, which was found in a shallow grave.
The case led to California’s passage of a "three strikes" law in 1994 that set longer sentences for repeat offenders. Aguirre, 46, was sentenced to death for the 2013 murder of his girlfriend’s 8-year-old son, Gabriel Fernandez, in Los Angeles. The boy’s mother, Pearl Fernandez, was sentenced to life in prison.
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