October 2026

October 23, 2026

To the editor: I am writing now as I have written so many other times since my brother’s murder in 2003 to tell anyone who will listen that contrary to what is so often proclaimed, the death penalty does not heal murder victim family members (“A death sentence is too heavy a decision to be overturned lightly,” Oct. 21). The death penalty harms victims’ families, other innocent families and society at large.

The death penalty will not bring my brother back. The millions of dollars used to process capital crimes are wasted tax money that could be used to solve cold-case murders like my brother’s. Killers by the hundreds if not thousands are still on the street. Dangling a spectacle of retribution does nothing for public safety, crime victims or justice. The prospect of the state-sanctioned killings of more than 500 people in California is untenable.

We all know that many of these promised executions are extremely unlikely to ever occur, making this a false promise to victims.

In the years since my brother Bob’s murder in Washington state, I have worked actively as a crime victim against the death penalty. In 2023, I testified at legislative hearings in Olympia, Wash., in favor of ending the death penalty. Ultimately, the death penalty there was eliminated by Gov. Jay Inslee. Clemency is a step in the right direction.

I hope Gov. Gavin Newsom will take that step before he leaves office.

Judy Kerr, Albany, Calif.

To the editor: This op-ed doesn’t consider that the death penalty system itself is inherently cruel, discriminatory and irreversible. The death penalty is a violation of human rights, and no government should have the power to take a life, regardless of the crime.

State-sanctioned killing should not be done under the guise of justice. Taking a life will never bring another life back. The death penalty operates under the unfounded pretense that it makes us safer — it does not. Instead, it only perpetuates a cycle of violence.

About 75% of all countries have abolished this cruel punishment in law or practice. The U.S. is an outlier, and it’s time for it to catch up. By commuting death sentences in California, Gov. Newsom could lead the U.S on a path that finally breaks the long and brutal legacy of state-sanctioned violence and upholds human rights for all.

Gavrilah Wells, San Francisco

This writer is the state death penalty abolition coordinator for Amnesty International USA in California.

To the editor: California has spent approximately $6 billion on its death penalty system since 1978. In return, the state has carried out just 13 executions — and none since 2006. That is an extraordinary amount of money for a system that has accomplished so little and remains deeply flawed.

It is also deeply immoral. As a member of the clergy, I believe in the sacredness of life. We are all created in God’s image and the state should not be empowered to take people’s lives.

Gov. Newsom should commute the sentences of everyone on California’s death row and redirect the state’s resources toward programs that actually make communities safer: mental health services, effective violence prevention and support for victims and survivors.

More than 500 people remain on death row, and two-thirds have been there for more than 20 years. Dozens of these men and women have spent more than four decades awaiting execution. Meanwhile, California has struggled for years to provide adequate attorneys for people challenging their convictions and sentences.

This is not fiscal responsibility. It is not public safety. And it is not justice.

California has already demonstrated that it can protect the public without carrying out executions: No one has been executed here in nearly 21 years.

Newsom should acknowledge what the numbers make clear. The death penalty is an extraordinarily expensive government program that does not make Californians safer. Commuting these sentences would allow California to invest instead in the people and programs that do.

Rabbi Suzanne Singer, Riverside

October 14, 2026 – By Anita Chabria

With not-terrible odds heading into the 2028 Democratic primaries, Gov. Gavin Newsom is getting one shared warning whispered in his ear by roughly 3,729 political consultants right now: Do not mess with the murderers.

Do not, under any circumstance, follow that inner voice that may be telling you to commute the death sentences of the 563 killers on California’s death row to life without parole, as Newsom recently admitted he was considering. Doing so would be a stupid move for an Oval Office wannabe, one already hobbled by the progressive persona of the Golden State.

“I’m getting all those people in my ear,” Newsom said during a podcast conversation with Bryan Stevenson, one of the preeminent death penalty lawyers in the country. “Don’t do it. Politics.”

Newsom already dismantled San Quentin’s execution chamber a few years ago, so the state can’t kill people even if it wanted to. But the governor has made it clear that he opposes the death penalty in principle because every year the evidence mounts that its implementation is flawed and racially biased. As he put it, the decision on commuting the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere may be his “rocking chair test,” a measure of whether he will have lived up to his own ideals when he looks back on his life.

Most other western countries have already banned the death penalty, leaving the U.S. in the company of places including North Korea and Libya when it comes to this punishment. Twenty-three states have abolished it, and three besides California have a moratorium. Nine governors over the years have commuted their entire death row, including one Republican. In 2024, on his way out of office, President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 federal prisoners, in part, Stevenson said, to prevent the Trump administration from using executions as theater.

But none of that is why Newsom should do it.

He should do it because we, the voters, are exhausted by the venality of politicians whose every move is controlled by politics and self-dealing. We need to believe that conscience is not a relic of America’s past, and roll reality back to a time when, occasionally, leaders acted because they believed in something, even if it wasn’t popular.

He should do it because our president glorifies violence and death (more on that in a moment) and people need a reminder that the America of hope and dreams, the America that always strives to be better, may be down, but she’s not out.

He should do it simply because he thinks it’s right.

“A lot of people in this country want a leader who is not trying to promote themselves, who’s not trying to advance themselves, is not always scheming for the angles and the corners,” Stevenson told me. “That’s not trying to just do what makes them get the most votes.”

Showing mercy to murderers historically has not been popular with voters. The tale of Willie Horton, the convicted murderer whose subsequent felonies tanked the 1988 presidential ambitions of then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, is still invoked like a Biblical lesson about the sin of soft-on-crime.

Horton’s warning happened during what now seems like the benign and civilized days of the President George H.W. Bush era, though. This moment is different, and all the advice about dodging this dodgy issue is now wrong.

America is increasingly in the death business, to steal a phrase from the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun — or at least our leaders are. Under the Trump administration, brutality, cruelty, corruption and even killings are being used as misguided and ugly proxies for strength and power. Fear is a weapon, death the point — the state can kill you if you make its leaders mad.

“It’s a handful of people whose view of the social order is very violent. It uses power. It abuses power. They think death is good for demonstrating strength,” Stevenson said.

Think that sounds overblown?

Just ask the family of Renee Good. Or Alex Pretti. Both Americans were killed by masked federal officers only 10 months ago. But so many other deaths have happened since then, they’re just ghosts in our collective psyche — haunting reminders that faceless, nameless agents are now empowered to roam our streets.

Most of us can no longer place the name Nurul Amin Shah Alam, the near-blind Rohingya refugee dumped by federal agents in the freezing cold on a February night. He was found dead five days later, his passing ruled a homicide.

Do you remember Lorenzo Salgado Araujo? Or Johan Sebastián Duran Guerrero? That’s what the business of death does, normalizes killings until they blend and fade in significance.

What about the 120 Iranian children, many of them little girls, who were killed when the U.S. bombed their school?

Then there are the roughly 238 people who have been executed by U.S. bombings of boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, allegedly while transporting drugs, though the killings took place with no arrests, no trials and no real evidence. Four of those killings happened in October, though they barely made news.

And there is the profiteering from death — the talk of resorts on the shores of Gaza, the government money saved by Elon Musk cutting off aid to starving children.

Now, if Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his way, a year that began with televised footage of the death of Good and Pretti will end with the live-streamed execution of Nidal Hasan, the paralyzed, wheelchair-using former Army psychiatrist who 17 years ago killed 13 and wounded 32 at Fort Hood in Texas. If the grotesque spectacle happens, it will be a throwback to the days of the Roman Colosseum when the business of state-sponsored death was at an apex, combining public violence with propaganda, politics and social control.

Stevenson warns that “we’re in the midst of a narrative struggle, and this struggle is for the soul of America.”

Newsom has the chance to, if not change that narrative, offer an alternative one — an America that rejects killing as the ultimate display of power. An America that seeks justice with dignity and wisdom, not arrogance and gore. An America that feels safe because our leaders act with integrity and honor, not with a slavish, intemperate ego.

Though there is a political risk inherent in striking out in a solitary direction, there can also be reward. As Stevenson told Newsom, that’s the “beauty of struggling for things that are right, struggling for things that are moral, struggling for things that are just — all kinds of people will come along, and when you feel like you just can’t take another step, there’ll be something there. There’ll be somebody there.”

My mercy isn’t for those on our death row, many of whom are guilty of gut-churning crimes. I’m not arguing that they are victims themselves, or even that some may have been unfairly tried, or even innocent, though that may be true. I acknowledge some families of victims may be angry if Newsom commutes sentences, though some will not.

My mercy is reserved for America, and those who are exhausted by the business of death, this business Trump wants us to believe is just American business — necessary and unavoidable.

A commutation of California’s death row sentences would be a rejection of Trump’s manic desire to pull us ever lower; a rejection of our growing cynicism that there is no such thing — Republican or Democrat — as a leader who acts from conscience. An assurance, instead, that it is still possible to heed an internal moral compass that is more powerful than the need for power.

Would voters really reject the leader who offered that? Would you?

Anita Chabria is a California columnist for the Los Angeles Times, based in Sacramento. Before joining The Times, she worked for the Sacramento Bee as a member of its statewide investigative team and previously covered criminal justice and City Hall. Follow her on Bluesky at anitachabria.bsky.social and on X at @anitachabria.

October 12, 2026 – By Austin Sarat

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has a chance to make history by commuting all death sentences in his state. He can and should do so by sparing the lives of the 563 California prisoners on death row.

Such an act would be the single most significant anti-death penalty act in all of American history. Never before has a political leader had the chance to save as many lives of people awaiting execution.

Coming at a moment when the nation’s attention is fixed on the cruelty of capital punishment, a mass commutation of the nation’s largest death row population would be a lightning bolt. It would be wind in the sails of abolitionists and provide political cover for governors in other death penalty states to empty their death rows.

And Newsom can solidify his already substantial standing as a leading voice against capital punishment without damaging his political prospects should he decide to run for president.

To get a sense of the magnitude and significance of a mass commutation in California, consider the following. Over the last two decades, 11 states have abolished the death penalty: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Virginia and Washington. In all of those states combined, the total death row population at the time of abolition was 69.

Or consider that to this point in American history, the largest mass clemency for people sentenced to death occurred as a result of the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, which invalidated the death sentences of 629 people who had been sentenced under constitutionally defective laws. 

In 2003, Illinois Gov. George Ryan (R) emptied his state’s death row by granting clemency to 167 people. And just before leaving office, President Biden commuted 37 death sentences to life in prison without parole.

While California currently has a moratorium on executions and has not executed a prisoner in 20 years, if Newsom issues a universal clemency in California, that single gesture would reduce the number of people on death row in the entire country by one-fourth.

In the Golden State, the path for such a clemency is complicated. As The New York Times explains, “Under California law, a governor can unilaterally grant clemency to a prisoner with a single conviction, but the State Supreme Court must approve a clemency request for inmates with multiple felony convictions.” However, whatever that court might do, Newsom could still spare the lives of more people than any other governor or president ever has.

The governor has been a persistent and outspoken critic of capital punishment. Newsom says that “The intentional killing of another person is wrong and … our death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure.” But news reports suggest that Newsom is weighing the impact a universal clemency might have on his campaign if he decides to run for president. 

The evidence suggests it would not significantly damage his political prospects.

During the 2020 presidential nominating campaign, almost every candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination opposed the death penalty, and in the run-up to the election that fall, Joe Biden was open about his opposition to capital punishment. 

Today, while a slim majority of the American public supports the death penalty, most Americans recognize the serious flaws in the death penalty system.

And if the result of the 2028 campaign were to depend on the results in so-called swing states, many of them would seem to be fertile ground for a candidate with a record of opposition to the death penalty. Two of those seven states (Michigan and Wisconsin) abolished capital punishment a long time ago.

Like California, Pennsylvania has a moratorium on executions currently in place and hasn’t executed anyone since 1999. Its governor, Josh Shapiro (D), opposes the death penalty and has called on the legislature to abolish it. He remains one of the most popular governors in the country.

The death penalty in North Carolina is on hold because of pending court challenges and has not executed anyone in two decades. Though he is not an abolitionist, former governor and current candidate for the U.S. Senate, Roy Cooper (D), commuted the death sentences of 15 people.

Like North Carolina, Nevada has the death penalty on the books but hasn’t executed anyone since 2006.

That leaves two of the swing states, Arizona and Georgia, where the death penalty is still legal and where executions have been carried out recently. 

But in Georgia, U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) has been an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, calling it “The final failsafe of white supremacy.” He still managed to win his seat in Congress.

Finally, in Arizona, public support for the death penalty has declined in recent years, as have the number of new death sentences being imposed in the state.

All of this suggests that Newsom has room to maneuver as he considers whether to follow his conscience and use his clemency power to deliver a devastating blow to America’s death penalty system. Should he do so, he will vindicate the hopes that the late Pope Francis expressed when Newsom visited him in 2024.

As The New York Times notes, when he saw Newsom, the Pope “flashed a thumbs up” and dubbed the governor his “’death penalty man.’”

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.