Death Penalty

For years after her sister Polly Klaas was murdered and the killer incarcerated on death row at San Quentin, Annie Nichol viewed the prison with dread, a place that contained the living embodiment of her unimaginable pain and fear.

“Every time I drove by San Quentin, I would kind of get a chill,” Nichol told me Sunday. “It felt scary.”

Last week, Nichol found herself not just inside that prison, but inside the death row unit where Polly’s killer once lived, inside a cell that had not long ago housed other murderers — sitting with her sister Jess Nichol and Gov. Gavin Newsom during an impromptu meeting that the women had never imagined would happen there.

Despite the unease of the setting, the conversation would lead Newsom to last week’s controversial decision to grant clemency to the 548 Californians sentenced to capital punishment, changing their terms instead to life without parole (the state Supreme Court still needs to weigh in on the majority of cases).

For all the public discussions about Newsom’s move, the roughly 25 private minutes he spent with the Nichol sisters was the final piece of a moral puzzle he’s been working on since he was 10, he told me — an unlikely journey that involves a mafia hit, a member of Polly’s family who opposes his decision, and warm socks.

Yes, socks.

But first, the cell.

In 2019, Newsom put a moratorium on the death penalty and began remaking San Quentin following a European model of incarceration that stresses rehabilitation. Death row, a cavernous hull of a building with multiple stories of concrete cells reaching up toward a ceiling so decrepit that birds roosted inside, was transformed.

Annie and Jess found themselves sitting inside a space that was once two cells, and now has a chess board and giant green plastic chairs. Fluorescent lights seeped everything in a cold blue glow.

“It did not feel good in there,” Annie said. “It still felt like dark and dank and creepy.”

The sisters had never met Newsom, and Newsom didn’t know anything about their opposition to the death penalty, he said. He did know Polly’s father, Marc Klaas, however. Klaas does not like Newsom.

Before Newsom announced his moratorium, he met with Klaas and a group of crime survivors. Klaas said then that he felt blindsided and outraged, and became “viscerally angry” during the meeting.

Monday, Klaas told me he’s angry all over again and can’t sleep.

“I don’t appreciate my daughter being regurgitated any time somebody wants to make a new unilateral change to the California Penal Code,” he said.

Newsom has spoken about his meeting with Klaas in the intervening years. Monday, he called it an “indelible conversation” that has held him back from taking further action on the death penalty.

“His pain is real,” Newsom said. “I have an abundance of respect for his point of view.”

And then he met Jess and Annie Nichol. The sisters had listened to a podcast that Newsom did with civil rights lawyer and anti-death-penalty advocate Bryan Stevenson months earlier and reached out to his office to ask if they could meet. They didn’t hear back until last week, when all three were planning to be in town for the San Quentin Film Festival.

The decision to gather in a cell was made on the fly, they said. But once inside, they found the governor to be “surprisingly emotionally available and curious and interested,” Jess said. “It felt like he wasn’t wearing his governor’s mask. Actually, it felt like a real moment of humanity.”

Newsom asked if they had always been against the death penalty, and Jess told him that in the beginning, after Polly’s death in 1993, they wanted the killer executed. “We thought that was justice,” she said. “Because f— that guy. And that’s what I said, for real.”

Newsom’s reponse? “Yeah, f— that guy,” she recalls him saying.

“It felt important that he understand that we haven’t forgiven the man who killed Polly,” Jess said. “We still feel anger and grief, but we just believe that those feelings, however understandable, shouldn’t determine public policy.”

But as the meeting wound down, the sisters realized they had forgotten the most important part — the ask.

“I said, OK, governor, I want to be direct here,” recalled Jess. “We are explicitly asking you to commute all death sentences in California.”

Newsom said that request, hearing it from Polly’s sisters, along with the plea that he give it equal weight to anything else that had been said by other crime survivors, was an intense moment for him — providing an unexpected emancipation from the emotions he had been carrying from his interaction with Marc Klaas.

“If there was any residual doubt left in terms of doing this, it was eliminated in that moment,” Newsom said.

Jess said it was clear to her that Newsom has been “wrestling with this for a long time, even since his childhood.”

When Newsom was about 10, he told me, he remembers sitting inside North Beach Restaurant in San Francisco. It’s an old-school, white tablecloth joint his father — a judge and a lion in Newsom’s memories — frequented. This day, Newsom recalls being joined by Pete Pianezzi, a former bank robber wrongly convicted of a 1937 Los Angeles double homicide.

Newsom’s grandfather, William Newsom II, and later his father, William Newsom III, were convinced of Pianezzi’s innocence and fought for years to help him gain a pardon and an exoneration (which he eventually did, from Gov. Pat Brown and then Gov. Jerry Brown, respectively). The Newsoms were right — a gangster-turned-informant confirmed Pianezzi had been framed by the mob.

Newsom said Pianezzi’s tale is what started him thinking about the death penalty — Pianezzi had escaped a capital sentence because a single juror refused it on moral grounds.

Pianezzi’s story was turned into a book, “The Bum Rap Kid,” and Newsom keeps a copy of it, along with the executive order pausing the death penalty, in the top drawer of his desk — “a reminder of why I’m here,” he said.

He sees the issue of the death penalty as part of a “deeper narrative” about criminal justice that has been central to his time in office.

Which brings us to the socks.

On the same day Newsom met the Nichol sisters, he spoke with an inmate who lives a few cells away from where they met. The guy had washed his clothes that day and called his father to tell him how it felt to have on fresh, warm socks for the first time in almost 20 years — the laundry facilities are new, part of that remodel of space and ideas that Newsom has championed. That conversation stuck with Newsom, too.

Newsom has been remaking our prison system to acknowledge the reality that the vast majority of people in prison are getting out one day. They will be in your communities, maybe even be your neighbors. Ask yourself this — what makes you safer? A rage-filled neighbor with no job or social skills, or an employed guy who knows how to take care of himself?

Appreciating warm socks is a little dose of civilization. Teaching people how to be civilized, one sock at a time, makes us all safer.

For the Nichol sisters, that vision of public safety — one that invests in survivors over punishment, and one that prioritizes changing outcomes for those inside and outside of prison — is ultimately what their opposition to the death penalty is about.

Knowing that their conversation with Newsom was so pivotal in his decision was shocking, they both said, and the entire event seems “surreal,” Jess said. But the result is what they see as a new legacy for Polly.

Her death became the impetus for California’s harsh three-strikes laws, which led to the over-incarceration of Black and brown people, often for minor crimes. The clemency, the Nichol sisters said, changes that.

“Annie and I will never forget that meeting for the rest of our lives,” Jess said.

For Newsom, the commutations seem, to me anyway, like the final act of his criminal justice reform, an overlooked and misunderstood legacy whose effectiveness won’t be known for years to come. But one he’s willing to take a risk on.

Newsom told me one of the worst moments of his political career — when he got caught during the COVID-19 pandemic at a fancy Napa Valley restaurant — was actually “the best thing that ever happened” to him because it reminded him of the responsibility he has to his power, and how fleeting that power is.

That’s the lesson he learned in North Beach, at a table with a felon and his father. And when it comes to how he feels about the fallout from this decision, whatever it may be, a text from his sister summed up what he’ll carry as its legacy: “Dad would be proud.”

While running for California governor in 2018, Gavin Newsom declared that he would rather be bold and fail than retreat to the safety of mediocrity.

The two-term governor known for taking big political risks once again made good on that vow Thursday when he moved to offer clemency to every inmate sentenced to death in California.

Amid a hum of speculation about how the mass commutation could help or hurt his presidential prospects in 2028, the Democratic politician sent a clear, defining message to Americans about where he stands and the type of leader they could expect.

“If my job is just to read the polls, you can have an AI chatbot as governor,” Newsom said in an interview Friday. “I was hired for my judgment, and like it or hate it, that was why I think I was given this privilege, and that’s the responsibility of a leader. My job’s leadership, not stewardship. It’s not management. It’s to lead.

“I’m here to change polls, change minds.”

The sweeping decision comes more than 20 years after Newsom emerged in the national consciousness when, as mayor of San Francisco, he defied federal law and allowed same-sex marriages in the City by the Bay.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks at the “Stop the Power Grab rally” at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on Nov. 1, 2026.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

Bold moves that test the limits of his power, such as a controversial, first-in-the-nation stay-at-home order during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and spearheading Proposition 50 last year to redraw California’s congressional districts to offset Republican attempts to gerrymander red states, have defined his leadership, for good or bad.

The Democratic governor said those kinds of decisions are “sort of embedded in my DNA.” About a decade ago he said he was pushed to describe his core motivation. Though he admits it sounds trite, the governor said: “It’s to stand up for ideals and strike out against injustice.”

The death penalty, he said, is not handed out equally. He quoted Bryan Stevenson, the founder of Equal Justice Initiative, who said you’re better off being rich and guilty than poor and innocent.

“I couldn’t not have done this,” Newsom said. “There was an easy out, but … I would the rest of my life felt, you know, ashamed of myself.”

Commuting the death sentences of all 548 state prisoners awaiting execution pushes the bounds of his authority once again. California voters have twice rejected ballot measures to abolish the death penalty, first in 2012 and again in 2016, and Newsom’s decision overrides the will of the courts and state laws that permit capital punishment.

Under the state Constitution, Newsom has the power to commute about 40% of the death sentences on his own. The rest of the cases, which involve prisoners who had a felony conviction on their record prior to receiving a death sentence, or racked up additional crimes while awaiting execution, require approval from the California Supreme Court — a constitutional check to ensure the governor’s actions are not an abuse of power.

The court rejected 10 commutations handed out by Gov. Jerry Brown in his last full month in office — all of which involved people convicted of multiple felonies — and did not provide an explanation for the action.

Despite Newsom’s push to commute all death sentences, capital punishment remains legal in California and prosecutors can continue seeking that punishment.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman speaks during a news conference at the Hall of Justice last month.

(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said until the law is changed, his office “will continue to evaluate every death penalty-eligible case with the rigor, care and restraint these decisions demand.”

Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper urged Newsom to reconsider the commutations.

He said he remembers watching Luis Bracamontes, who was sentenced to death for killing Sacramento County Sheriff’s Deputy Danny Oliver and Placer County Sheriff’s Detective Michael Davis Jr. in 2014, “laugh in court while their families, including Danny’s two young daughters, had to sit and watch.

“Deputy Danny Oliver and Detective Michael Davis Jr. should be alive today, enjoying long and healthy lives with their families,” Cooper said in a statement. “Instead, the man who murdered them has now escaped his sentence.”

Others accused the governor of reducing the death penalty sentences to seek an advantage in the 2028 presidential election.

“The people of California deserve leaders who put politics and personal ambition aside and pursue truth, accountability, and justice with courage, integrity, and transparency,” said Michael Hestrin, Riverside County district attorney, in a statement. “Instead they have been presented with a decision that demonstrates a profound disregard for the victims, their families, and the prosecutors who dedicated themselves to seeking justice on their behalf.”

Luis Bracamontes looks up in Sacramento Superior Court in 2018 as the verdict is read in the killing of two law enforcement officers. Bracamontes was found guilty.

(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

A poll conducted in August by the Pew Research Center found that about two-thirds of voters nationally favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder.

Political analysts suggest that reducing the sentences adds to Newsom’s credentials as a progressive leader and aligns him with Democratic primary voters on the issue if he runs for president. Republicans, however, could take advantage of Newsom’s action and cast him as a soft-on-crime liberal who is out of touch with most Americans, which risks turning away moderate voters.

But others cautioned that national political elections are hard to predict.

Gar Culbert, chair of the political science department at Cal State Los Angeles, said it would be politically advantageous for Newsom to try to appeal to the Democratic Party’s base as he considers a run for president. Culbert said he doesn’t believe the death penalty will be a substantial issue in a general election when, if Newsom becomes the Democratic presidential nominee, his Republican challenger would attack his record as California governor regardless.

“It’s possible he’s not being strategic,” Culbert said. “Maybe he doesn’t have to be strategic because he just might think it’s the right thing to do.”

The governor first issued a moratorium on executions about two months after he took office in 2019, saying capital punishment is discriminatory and unjust. Without the moratorium, 45 people would be subject to execution now, according to his office.

Daniel Zingale worked for Newsom as a senior advisor in the governor’s office at the start of his first term. Part of Zingale’s job at the time was to consider how the governor’s actions would be received by the public.

“The only piece of data he was not interested in in that process were the polls,” Zingale said. “His view, and I agree with this, is this is not an issue that you can leverage politically.”

Newsom’s decision to commute the sentences won’t have much practical effect in a state that has not executed a prisoner since 2006. At Newsom’s command, the death chamber was dismantled at San Quentin State Prison, now San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, after he issued his moratorium.

His successor, Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra, has also said he will continue the pause on executions.

There was no immediate need to offer commutations to save the lives of the inmates.

Taking no action would have been the safe bet, Newsom said in an interview about his decision a day after he made the announcement. Many people around him, he said, advised him to do nothing.

He also understands that commuting the sentences could make him vulnerable if he runs for president.

“I’m not an idiot. The ads write themselves,” Newsom said. “But I just also would be fake. I wouldn’t be myself and if I’m going to be up there and not be myself, I couldn’t do that.”

With the clock ticking on his time in office, the governor said he also doesn’t want to leave with regrets.

“I don’t want to be one of the elders on some panel talking about what I would have, could have, should have done,” Newsom said. “I’ve spent my life trying not to be that person. I’ve been willing to take risks. I’ve been willing to go first on so many issues.

“If others aren’t willing to do it, you know what? I’ll raise my hand, and I’m happy, honestly, to take the hits.”

Courage in politics is rare.

It’s especially difficult and fraught for a politician such as Gavin Newsom, who has Oval Office ambitions and everything to lose from a misstep. Playing it safe is playing it smart.

On Thursday, Newsom took what can only be described as a courageous stand, a risky stand — commuting the death sentences of the 548 men and women condemned to die in California, and instead seeking to change their sentences to life without parole.

Many people will stop reading right now because honestly, do you care what happens to those on death row? They’ve raped, murdered, robbed, tortured — you name the heinous crime, one of them has done it. They are not the most sympathetic lot, and in truth many of us have ambivalent feelings on the death penalty.

It’s that ambivalence, that uncertainty, that makes Newsom’s move so interesting. We are in the most unlikely of moments — witnessing a self-inflicted test of political endurance from a savvy politician who didn’t need to go there. What happens in these strange days when a presidential hopeful takes an unnecessary risk simply because he believes it’s the right thing to do?

Newsom will be roasted by those claiming to be tough-on-crime types. They predictably will cry that he is circumventing the will of the people and disrespecting crime victims and juries. Some will say he cares more about criminals than victims. Fox News is going to have a field day.

Newsom has publicly pondered this decision for some time, calling it a “rocking chair” choice, one he’s likely to look back on someday to judge whether he lived up to his own ideals. He has said he is morally opposed to the state killing to prove killing is bad. As he terms out of office, he had only a couple of months left to take action on that belief before the power to end the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere slips out of his hands.

“Faithfulness to our values is measured by how we act when it’s most difficult to uphold them,” Newsom wrote in a letter to Californians announcing his decision. This, he said, was one of those moments for him.

“Americans are looking for leadership that is more principled,” civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson told me, arguing Newsom’s move is actually in sync with the electorate. Stevenson is one of the people Newsom has talked to about the death penalty, and the founder of the Legacy Museum in Alabama, which traces the line from slavery to mass incarceration.

The shocking blue-wave midterms showed that Americans aren’t just tired of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, he said. They are tired of injustice, tired of selfish, self-serving leaders, tired of fearing that their own government might crush them simply because it can.

Across the country, voters elected political leaders who stood for something — who bucked the trends to run on their values and vision of a better America, even if it wasn’t mainstream or safe.

So whether Americans agree with Newsom’s decision to commute these sentences to life without parole or not, voters are at a moment when I suspect, as Stevenson does, that they may embrace his courage to stand for something, even if they don’t agree with what that something is.

The death penalty is the ultimate expression of that power of government to crush. Support for it has been mixed for years, even among liberals — though young people are less likely to back it. It has been banned in nearly every Western democracy including almost all of Europe, Canada and New Zealand.

Twenty-seven U.S. states either have abolished it or have gubernatorial moratoriums on it (Newsom enacted one in California a few years ago). And President Biden commuted the death sentences of most federal inmates in his final days of office, as have several other governors over the years.

There also has been a growing understanding in the U.S. that race bias is baked into how we use the death penalty. Black and brown people make up the majority of those on death row, and crimes in which the victim is white are more likely to draw the death sentence — even when we get it wrong.

More than 200 people on death row have been exonerated across the United States since the 1970s — including eight in California — meaning that for every eight people we have put to death, there has been one other who was going to be killed by the state until we figured out they were innocent.

So while there’s a moral argument to be made against the state killing people to prove killing people is wrong, there’s also a practical one: It turns out we’re really bad at imposing a lethal sentence fairly, or even correctly.

Vicente Benavides Figueroa is proof of that. After 25 years on death row, the justice system finally realized it had made a terrible error in his conviction. Figueroa wasn’t just railroaded into a lethal sentence — for the murder, rape and sodomy of a toddler — the crime itself likely never actually happened.

Figueroa was a seasonal farmworker, a Mexican immigrant with less than a high school education, who was watching his girlfriend’s kids in the Central Valley in 1991 when he lost track of the youngest, Consuelo, for 15 minutes. When he found her, she was in the front yard, unresponsive and vomiting.

One thing led to another — a “reckless” investigation, as his civil attorney Salomon Zavala, describes it; faulty translators; a mostly white jury who werefar from his peers; and erroneous medical testimony — and Figueroa was convicted. The machine of justice was so grinding that Figueroa did not understand he had been sentenced to death until he got to San Quentin.

Decades later, the doctors who claimed Consuelo was raped and sodomized would realize the injuries were likely because of trauma from medical workers attempting to insert an adult-sized catheter. They recanted. New experts, hired by the defense, theorized the child had been hit by a car, causing the extensive internal injuries that killed her. The witnesses now agreed the child never had been raped or sodomized.

Figueroa’s conviction was overturned by the state Supreme Court in 2018, citing false evidence in the original trial.

“No matter what your moral position is on the death penalty, I think we have to look at it from a standpoint of institutional responsibility,” Zavala, the lawyer, told me. “We have to really think about whether we, as a society, are comfortable with executing someone that could potentially be innocent.”

I’m of the mind that erroneously killing one person in the name of justice is one too many — that the death penalty is an unacceptable risk.

I take nothing away from, nor mean to diminish, the importance or pain of any victim, their story or their point of view. Their pain is real and enduring, and surely there will be some who feel Newsom’s decision robs them of some sort of final resolution.

But pain cannot define justice.

It’s easy to forget that Newsom is married to a survivor of violent crime, and knows as well as anyone how complicated and difficult and personal the journey to recovery is, and how that suffering affects not just victims, but also families and communities.

But whether or not the state should be in the business of killing has to be a bigger decision that we consider collectively in moments when we are not in distress.

Newsom’s decision does that, seeking to go beyond “these performative sentences that just represent a lot of fear and anger,” Stevenson said, and move our justice system toward one that lives up to the ideal of promoting safety and fairness over vengeance. And even then, the state Supreme Court will have a say in the majority of these clemencies, since Newsom needs their approval in cases where there are repeat felonies.

But it’s a can of worms he didn’t have to open — the clearest statement we’ll ever get of who Newsom is as a leader.

And it’s a welcome reminder that sometimes, occasionally, values still have a place in politics.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that he will commute the sentences of all 548 people on death row in the state, the largest mass clemency in United States history.

The announcement on Thursday effectively clears out California’s death row, although the state has not executed a prisoner for 20 years. Those on death row will instead serve life sentences without the possibility of parole.

“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,” Newsom said in an open letter.

Support for the death penalty in the US has largely declined since the 1990s, although it still holds majority backing.

A Pew Research Center poll released in August found that 66 percent of Americans supported the punishment for those convicted of murder. Roughly 73 percent, however, acknowledged there was a risk of executing an innocent person.

Because death penalty cases often involve long and arduous legal appeals, many of those on death row are never executed.

Twenty-three states have banned the practice outright, and others have effectively abandoned it even if the punishment remains on the books.

Still, President Donald Trump, a Republican, has championed the death penalty for serious federal crimes. In April, his administration pledged to expand the use of federal executions, including by employing firing squads.

While proponents of the death penalty have argued that the punishment has a deterrent effect, critics say decades of scholarship indicate otherwise.

They have also pointed to ethical and logistical issues, including the expense.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), California has spent $6bn on the death penalty since 1978 while carrying out just 13 executions in that time.

Capital punishment has also been criticised for being applied disproportionately to racial minorities and for the frequency of botched executions.

The DPIC says that, since 1973, at least 203 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the US have later been exonerated.

Newsom’s decision has been praised by criminal justice groups as a step away from a practice they say is outdated, inefficient and immoral.

“Governor Newsom’s announcement marks a decisive moment in the history of the death penalty in the United States. Though other governors have granted universal clemencies, none have been at this scale,” Robin Maher, the executive director of the DPIC, said in a statement.

“By bookending his time as governor first with a moratorium and now this mass clemency, Governor Newsom has irrevocably changed California’s relationship with the death penalty.”

The DPIC noted that about two-thirds of the commutations must be reviewed by the California Supreme Court, which is required under state law to review clemency for anyone with multiple felony convictions, before they become final.

Despite its left-leaning reputation, California previously served as a laboratory for punitive criminal justice policies in the late 20th century, during the heyday of the US’s tough-on-crime politics.

The states of Washington and California, for instance, were among the first to pass “three strikes” laws in the early 1990s, punishing repeat offenders with high minimum sentences.

The state continues to have the largest death row in the country.

Newsom’s decision will reduce the number of people on death row nationally by nearly 30 percent.

The announcement also comes days after a blockbuster night for the Democratic Party in the US midterm elections, with major wins in formerly right-wing strongholds such as Texas and Kansas.

The so-called “blue wave” during the midterms has set off speculation over potential Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2028.

As governor for nearly eight years, Newsom has reached California’s term limits: His second and final term will end in January 2027.

He will be replaced by former US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra on January 4.

But Newsom has long been seen as a likely presidential contender, and he has increasingly dedicated time to serving as a proxy to support Democratic candidates in key races nationwide.

He has, however, taken positions on criminal justice issues that have put him at odds with criminal justice groups and the state legislature.

In 2022, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have placed limits in state prisons on the use of solitary confinement, a practice defined as torture by the United Nations after certain lengths of time.

In 2019, he also vetoed a measure that would have limited cooperation between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and prison authorities, and a similar bill failed in the state Senate in 2022.

Gov. Gavin Newsom told the California Supreme Court Thursday that he will commute the death sentences of all 548 state prisoners awaiting execution, reducing their punishments to life in prison without parole.

Newsom can commute about 40% of the death sentences with the stroke of a pen, but the rest will require the high court’s approval in order to be finalized.

The mass commutation would apply to inmates convicted of some of the most heinous acts in the state’s history. Newsom and other opponents of capital punishment have long argued that the process is costly, cruel and discriminatory, with death sentences disproportionately handed down to defendants of color.

“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 explaining his decision. “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.”

The move comes in Newsom’s final months as governor and as he considers a run for president. Reducing the death sentences could help him in a primary with a Democratic base of like-minded liberal voters, but potentially hurt him in a general election with a national electorate that supports capital punishment.

The decision to officially spare the condemned inmates is largely symbolic in a state that has not executed a prisoner since 2006, though experts say it could save millions of dollars in court costs every year. Only 13 inmates have been killed since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978. The state’s electorate reaffirmed its support a decade ago, voting down a ballot initiative that would have abolished capital punishment. Polls show its popularity has waned in the years since.

Despite his outspoken opposition to state-sanctioned executions, the governor has declined to use his political influence with voters to pursue a ballot measure that would amend the state Constitution to align with his position and officially end the death penalty. Without changing state law, criminals can continue to be sentenced to death in California.

“California voters have voted to keep the death penalty on the books and I respect that,” Newsom wrote in the letter to Californians. “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.”

Newsom made national headlines two months after his inauguration in 2019 when he issued a temporary moratorium on executions and vowed to dismantle the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison, now called San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Calling the death penalty system a “failure,” Newsom said the punishment is also often reserved for poor people who cannot afford expensive legal representation, fails to deter crime and wastes taxpayer money.

Careful to avoid elevating a death penalty debate in the midterm elections, Newsom intentionally waited until after the general election on Tuesday to go a step further and launch the process of commuting all California death penalty sentences.

The decision is another bold signature Newsom move that sits well with his base of support in California and wealthy, white and college-educated national voters who would be crucial to his success in a Democratic presidential primary, said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant.

However, his liberal stance on government executions could also create a vulnerability for him if he advances in the 2028 presidential election as the party’s nominee.

“Gavin’s exactly right with that base Democratic voter on that position,” Madrid said. “One hundred percent. It makes him a champion.”

But more moderate blue-collar voters who helped the party flip Congress in the midterms, Madrid added, are “not in line with him on this.”

A poll conducted in August by the Pew Research Center found that about two-thirds of voters nationally favor the death penalty for people convicted or murder.

Those numbers could shift following the botched lethal injection of Christa Pike in Tennessee in September and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s now-scuttled plan to livestream the execution of Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan by firing squad.

“Those events have really ripped the veneer off the death penalty in this country,” said attorney Natasha Minsker of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition. “The death penalty is an act of violence. It’s taking another life. I think that’s become clear to the entire country.”

The state spends more than $200 million a year to adjudicate automatic death penalty appeals and habeas corpus petitions for inmates who, in all likelihood, will never be executed, according to a 2025 report by the Habeas Corpus Resource Center.

The case of Clarence Ray Allen, the last inmate killed by lethal injection in California 20 years ago, is emblematic of how the law has failed, death penalty opponents say.

Allen was 76, making him the second-oldest person ever executed in the United States. He had been on death row for 23 years and his appeals cost the state more than $750,000. Many current condemned inmates are even older — some in their 80s and 90s — and their appeals even more drawn out and expensive.

“It’s just a broken system,” said Michael Hersek, former executive director of Habeas Corpus Resource Center and an ex-state public defender.

Taxpayers foot the bill for both the defense and the prosecution in post-conviction capital cases, as well as the administrative judicial costs associated with years of complicated appeals in state and federal court.

The existing appeal requirements were instituted to counter long-standing racial bias in capital sentencing. Attempts to reform and expedite the appeals process over the years have further gummed up the system.

“There is no indication that the situation has improved, and … [there are] data indicating that it has worsened,” Justice Leondra R. Kruger wrote for the California Supreme Court in 2024.

It’s estimated that death penalty appeals alone constitute about a quarter of the work of the California Supreme Court.

“It’s ludicrous, the amount of time, resources and energy put into these cases,” Hersek said.

Some victims’ families agree.

“The death penalty is this promise to people who are angry and broken that you’re somehow going to make them feel better by executing this person,” said Bethany Webb, whose sister Laura was among eight people killed in a mass shooting in Seal Beach in 2011.

Their mother was also shot and badly injured in the attack.

“It is brutalizing to family members, the whole system,” Webb said.

Others say Newsom’s latest move is a betrayal of the justice they were promised.

“It’s total disrespect for the victims. It’s a slap in the face,” said Sandy Friend, whose 8-year-old son Michael Lyons was abducted, raped and murdered in 1996.

She and other relatives stressed the unique brutality of many capital crimes, saying Newsom did not consider victims’ suffering when commuting their killers’ sentences.

The commutations would go to inmates such as Charles Ng, who was convicted of killing six men, three women and two infant boys in Northern California in 1984 and 1985. Also in line to benefit is Richard Allen Davis, who abducted and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma in 1993, sparking a months-long search that gripped the nation. Another condemned inmate, Christopher Cheary, was convicted of murdering, raping and torturing his girlfriend’s 3-year-old daughter, Sophia Acosta, in Tulare County.

Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra also opposes the death penalty. If state leaders wanted to resume executions, experts say it would take the better part of a decade and millions of dollars in new spending for the state to design and approve a workable protocol for lethal injections, rebuild a death chamber and secure the gray-market drugs necessary to perform executions.

Legal experts believe the end of the death penalty is likely inevitable in California, with or without Newsom’s involvement.

In 2024, the Office of the State Public Defender sued California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office, arguing “persistent and pervasive racial disparities infect California’s death penalty system.”

This spring, the California Supreme Court ordered Bonta’s California Department of Justice to show cause why it should not declare the death penalty unconstitutional — a move widely read as signaling the justices’ ultimate intent to end it.

“The statistical findings in the studies invoked by petitioners are extraordinarily disturbing,” Bonta wrote in his reply to the order in August. “Evidence of pervasive racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty could show that California’s capital punishment system gives rise to a constitutionally intolerable risk of arbitrariness.”

Around 60% of the inmates in line for commutations would require review and approval by the California Supreme Court before Newsom’s term ends in January. Those cases involve prisoners who had a felony conviction on their record prior to receiving a death sentence, or racked up additional crimes while awaiting execution.

The high court previously rejected 10 clemency cases without much clarification when Gov. Jerry Brown submitted them in 2018 months before he left office.

If approved by the California Supreme Court, the immediate effect could be relatively muted. The death chamber was taken down and all but a handful of the remaining condemned inmates were relocated from segregated housing in San Quentin to other facilities across the state after Newsom’s 2019 moratorium.

The decision to formally pause executions drew support from the late Pope Francis during Newsom’s 2024 trip to the Vatican, according to the governor’s retelling of a brief conversation between the two men.

In a subsequent interview, the governor said his Catholic background and the inequities in the criminal justice system influenced his refusal to sign off on executions. His father, the late William Newsom, also opposed the death penalty.

His father and grandfather were involved in the case of Pete Pianezzi, a friend who was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting and killing of a gambler and busboy in Los Angeles in 1937.

Pianezzi escaped the death penalty by a single vote and served 13 years in prison. He was later exonerated.

Even if it were possible to limit inequity and wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system, Newsom has said he would still be against the death penalty.

“The decision is among the most difficult in my career, not because I doubt its necessity for our state but because I know its announcement may surface excruciating memories for victims’ families,” Newsom wrote in the letter to Californians. “Today I am acting on my long and deeply held conviction that individually and collectively we are stronger as a society when we reject state-sanctioned killing.”

VATICAN CITY — Pope Leo XIV has become the first pope to vote in a U.S. general election, casting a mail-in ballot in a contest that will decide America’s future as the Trump era slowly comes to an end.

The Vatican confirmed Friday that the Chicago-born pontiff had submitted a mail-in ballot in Chicago ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, citing his long-standing belief in civic participation.

Leo, formerly Robert Prevost, “has exercised his right to vote as a United States citizen” and has done so “whenever he was eligible to do so,” the Holy See press office said.

The statement said he had also voted while living in Peru whenever he was eligible. Leo lived in Peru as a missionary priest and bishop for over 20 years.

“The Holy Father expresses his belief in the right and the duty of citizens to participate in democratic processes,” it added.

Leo holds U.S. and Peruvian citizenship, and is also the head of state of a foreign country, the Holy See. The city state is an absolute monarchy with no political elections.

This election, Illinois voters are deciding whether to elect Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to his third term, and they’re also filling an open U.S. Senate seat after longtime Catholic Democrat Dick Durbin’s retirement. President Donald Trump is not on the ballot but he has campaigned hard to try to preserve Republican control of the U.S. House and Senate for the final two years of his second term.

Leo’s vote was first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, which quoted the chief of staff at the Will County clerk’s office as saying the pope, registered at a New Lenox address, requested a mail-in ballot on Oct. 3.

The request was made just 10 days before Leo underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his right lung. Leo has been slowly resuming his activities at the Vatican after being released from the hospital Oct. 17.

It is unclear how Leo returned the ballot. The pope’s older brother, John Prevost, was in Rome this week accompanying parishioners from St. Jude’s, an Augustinian-run parish in New Lenox, Illinois. The elder Prevost attends Mass there, and Leo gave a talk at the parish in 2024 while still a cardinal.

Prevost’s past votes have gone Democratic and Republican

Since 2000, Robert Prevost has voted in five primary elections, requesting Democratic ballots twice and Republican ballots three times, according to records held by the Illinois State Board of Elections.

The records do not show which candidates he supported. Illinois voters must declare a party preference to receive a primary ballot. No such declaration is required in general elections.

While registered in heavily Democratic Cook County, Prevost requested Democratic primary ballots in 2008 and 2010. After moving to the more conservative suburban Will County, he requested Republican primary ballots in 2012, 2014 and 2016.

The records also show that he submitted ballots in every general election since 2000 except those in 2020 and 2022.

Clashes with Trump

Since becoming pope, Leo has drawn criticism from President Donald Trump for repeatedly condemning the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran and calling for dignified treatment of immigrants.

Earlier this year, Trump called Leo “weak” and captive to the “radical left.”

Responding to Trump’s public rebuke, Leo told reporters en route to Algeria in April: “I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, which is what the church works for.”

“I will continue to speak out strongly against war, seeking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateralism among states to find solutions to problems,” he said.

The public dispute has subsided in recent months.

A pope who follows U.S. politics closely

Leo has made clear on several occasions that he follows local and national U.S. politics closely, and is not afraid to intervene.

He has repeatedly called for reflection and humane treatment for immigrants in his native U.S. amid the Trump administration crackdown and mass deportation program.

Recently, Leo reiterated official church teaching declaring the death penalty “inadmissible.” He made the pronouncement in a social media post on the World Day Against the Death Penalty, which came as the U.S. announced plans to livestream an execution by firing squad. The plans were later scrapped.

In 2025, Leo intervened in a debate over abortion, after Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich announced plans to give a lifetime achievement award to Sen. Durbin. The plans drew objection from some conservative U.S. bishops given the powerful Democratic senator’s support for abortion rights. Leo called for respect for both sides, but he also pointed out the contradiction between people who call themselves “pro-life” but also support the death penalty.

Also in 2025, Leo said he was “very disappointed” that his home state of Illinois approved a law allowing medically assisted dying, which is condemned by the Catholic Church.

Winfield writes for the Associated Press. AP editor Holly Meyer contributed to this report from Nashville, Tenn.

The US president has long been unhappy with inside information about his administration being leaked to the media.

United States President Donald Trump has suggested that those who leak information to the news media should be shot as punishment.

Trump made the remarks at a campaign rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, as he urged supporters to vote in the November 3 midterm elections.

“In my opinion, leakers should be shot,” Trump told the crowd. “In the old days, we used to shoot leakers, you know, when they leak what time you’re going to attack a country.”

Trump made the statement in an apparent reference to Operation Midnight Hammer, which saw the US launch a surprise attack on Iran in June 2025 during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran.

In the aftermath of the attack, several media outlets published findings from a preliminary report by the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

That report – which had not yet been released to the public – indicated that Iran was able to move some of its enriched uranium away from the sites the US had bombed.

It also suggested that the extent of the damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities was more modest than what Trump had asserted.

Trump, however, appeared to signal that the timing of the US attacks was among the leaked information. He accused the news media of putting military members in danger, calling out The New York Times and CNN in particular.

“They leaked the time we were leaving, the time we were arriving,” Trump said, claiming he had to reschedule the bombing campaign two days later as a result.

“Somebody leaked. Some sleaze-bag, they ought to go to jail or be shot. For the rest of their life, they should be in jail.”

Trump has long had an adversarial relationship with the news media, and he has previously called for harsh punishment against any official who passes on confidential information to news outlets.

After parts of the Defense Intelligence Agency report became public, he blamed lawmakers in the Democratic Party for its release.

“The Democrats are the ones who leaked the information on the PERFECT FLIGHT to the Nuclear Sites in Iran,” Trump wrote on social media at the time. “They should be prosecuted!”

Under Trump, the White House has taken aggressive action to track down the source of leaks.

Staff in his administration, as well as officers in the military, have also been asked to take polygraph tests.

Journalists at several news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, have also received subpoenas aimed at determining the sources of internal information made public.

The newspapers had reported on stories such as a botched Navy SEALs raid in North Korea and how Trump ignored internal Pentagon warnings against launching the Iran war.

Last year, the Department of Defense demanded that journalists who wished to access the Pentagon sign an agreement not to publish unauthorised material.

Much of the Pentagon press corps refused to agree, and a federal court struck down many of the new demands made on journalists at the department.

Trump has long raged against leakers, going back to his first term as president from 2017 to 2021.

Former White House official Alyssa Farah Griffin told a podcast in 2024 that Trump had called for leakers to be executed, after media outlets reported that he had taken shelter in a White House bunker during racial justice protests in 2020.

Trump appeared to reprise that sentiment in his speech to Arizona voters on Wednesday, less than three weeks before the November 3 midterms.

“Leakers should be dealt with very, very strongly,” Trump said. “To me, they are the scum of the earth.”