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California Gov. Gavin Newsom has commuted the death sentences of all 548 people on the state’s death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole, in what the Death Penalty Information Center calls the largest mass commutation in American history — and the decision has drawn fierce backlash from victims’ families and prosecutors.
Newsom announced the move on Thursday, November 5, in an open letter addressed “to all Californians.” “I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us,” he wrote. “These offenders will die in prison but not by our hand.”
The commutations are not final for most of the 548. Under the California Constitution, the governor cannot commute the sentence of anyone convicted of more than one felony without a recommendation from the California Supreme Court, with at least four of the seven justices concurring. Newsom’s office says that covers 382 of the 548 cases — about 70 percent — and the court has set no timetable. The remaining roughly 166 take effect immediately. Prosecutors and victims’ groups have pledged to challenge the commutations before the court.
Among those whose sentences Newsom moved to commute is Richard Allen Davis, who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her bedroom at knifepoint during a sleepover in Petaluma in 1993, strangled her and buried her in a shallow grave. Davis was sentenced to death in 1996.
Polly’s father, Marc Klaas, condemned the decision. “He just gave the gift of life to [hundreds of] people who took the gift of life from their victims,” he told Fox News Digital. In an interview with the California Post, he said: “He’s putting these people closer and closer and closer to freedom, and these are absolutely the worst, most disgusting people that have ever lived.” “The whole idea that my daughter’s killer is getting this gift of life that was denied to all of the victims of these characters” offends him, he said.
Newsom said the decision was shaped by a chance meeting in late October with Polly Klaas’s sisters, Jess and Annie Nichol, at a film festival at San Quentin State Prison, where Davis had been housed for 30 years. The three spoke in a converted death row cell, and the sisters told him that not all victims’ families believed capital punishment was the best way forward. “Then don’t ever forget what we just said to you, and that sticks with you as long as his comments stuck with you,” one of them told him, Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle. Newsom had spoken with Marc Klaas in 2019, when he issued an executive order pausing all executions; Klaas opposed the moratorium and opposes the commutation.
The commutations also cover some of California’s most notorious cases, including Charles Ng, convicted of killing 11 people in the Sierra Nevada foothills in the 1980s; Scott Peterson, convicted of murdering his pregnant wife, Laci Peterson; Cary Stayner, who murdered four women near Yosemite National Park; and serial killer Randy Kraft. Of the 548, 529 are men and 19 are women.
Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman warned on Friday that the decision could eventually allow convicted killers to seek freedom, including more than 100 sentenced in Los Angeles County. San Luis Obispo County District Attorney Dan Dow and other prosecutors have framed the move as an attack on jury verdicts, victims’ families and the rule of law. Anne Marie Schubert, chief executive of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation and a former prosecutor, said her group would challenge the commutations in the state Supreme Court.
Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions shortly after taking office in March 2019 and later dismantled the execution chamber at San Quentin. California has not carried out an execution since 2006. The commutations do not repeal the death penalty — voters kept it in 2012 and 2016, and prosecutors can still seek it in new cases — and those whose sentences are commuted will not be eligible for the parole board’s newer commutation and resentencing procedures. Newsom, who is term-limited, leaves office in January; Democrat Xavier Becerra won the November 3 election to succeed him.