Governor Gavin Newsom announced today that he is commuting every death sentence in California — all 548 of them — to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Let’s be clear about what that means, because the screaming has already started and most of it skips this part. Nobody is being released. Nobody is going home. Every one of these 548 people will die in prison. The only thing that changes is how: of old age or sickness, in a cell, instead of on a gurney, in a chamber. California was never going to use that chamber anyway, and I’ll come back to that.

The reaction came in on cue. Steve Herr, whose son was murdered by one of the men on the row, called the commutation “a cowardly way out.” The president of the state prosecutors’ association said Newsom “disregarded the decisions of hundreds of jurors and judges.” Orange County’s district attorney called it “mercy for the wolves.”

I’m not going to pretend to stand in a murdered man’s father’s shoes. But I want to ask the rest of them a question, and it’s the whole post: what exactly did you lose today?

California has not executed anybody in over twenty years. The last time was January 17, 2006, when the state put Clarence Ray Allen to death at San Quentin. Allen was 76 years old. He had been sentenced in 1982. He sat on death row for 23 years, and then the state killed a 76-year-old man and called it the completion of his sentence. What was the hurry? He had already served 23 years. How much time did he have left — ten years, maybe fifteen? What did the gurney add that the 23 years hadn’t?

And Allen is worth pausing on for another reason: he is one of only thirteen people California has executed since voters brought the death penalty back in 1978. Thirteen, in 48 years. In that same period Texas has executed 603 people — over a third of all the executions in America. Florida is second, with 144, and Florida is the state actually running its chamber these days: it carried out its nineteenth execution of the year on the very day Newsom signed. That’s what a working death penalty looks like. California never had one. California had a waiting room.

Look at who is in it. On the corrections department’s own list, half the people on California’s death row — 283 of them — were put there before the year 2000. They have been under sentence of death for more than a quarter of a century. Three of them were sentenced in 1979. They have been waiting 47 years. The oldest man on the row, David Carpenter, is 96 years old. He has been there since 1984. The state of California is maintaining a death sentence on a 96-year-old man, and people are furious that the governor finally admitted the obvious.

Because here is how death row actually ends in California. Since 1978, by the corrections department’s own tally: 126 condemned prisoners died of natural causes. Thirty-two killed themselves. Eighteen more died of other causes, and nine more deaths are still unclassified. That is at least 176 people who died on death row without the state lifting a finger — against the 13 the state executed. The row is not a place where killers go to be executed. It is a place where they go to grow old and die, at better than ten-to-one odds against the executioner ever showing up.

Ask a hundred Californians when their state last executed somebody, and most of them couldn’t tell you the decade. Anyone under forty can honestly say it hasn’t happened in their lifetime. Whole lives have been lived inside the gap — children born in 2006 are old enough to vote now. A punishment a state goes twenty years without using isn’t a policy. It’s an heirloom, kept in a drawer and taken out now and then so people can feel something about it.

And that, I think, is what today’s outrage actually is. Strip it down. Nobody is less safe tonight than they were this morning. Nobody convicted of anything walks free. The 548 will die in prison, exactly as they were always going to. The only thing taken away today is the possibility of the killing itself — the theoretical future moment when the state would strap one of them down. If losing that moment is what upsets you, then the moment was the point. Not safety. Not justice, either: a man dying in a cell at 80 because the state killed him, versus dying in the same cell at 80 because his heart stopped, is not a difference justice can measure. It’s a difference revenge can. Craving the death of another person has a name, and the name is bloodthirstiness.

One more wrinkle, because it shows how empty the fight is. For 382 of the 548, the state constitution says the governor needs the California Supreme Court to recommend the commutation before he can sign it. If the court says no — and it might — those men and women stay on death row. Newsom’s moratorium ends when he leaves office, but Becerra — who takes over in January — ran on putting it right back in place, so there will be no executions under him either. And nothing changes. Nothing at all. They will go on doing what the row’s residents have done for going on half a century: aging, sickening, and dying on schedule, unexecuted, while the state pretends the sentence hanging over them is real.

And the machinery is gone besides. When Newsom declared the moratorium in 2019, he ordered San Quentin’s execution chamber dismantled — and in the years since, the state has emptied death row itself, moving the condemned out to other prisons while the row was taken apart. California has no approved method of execution on the books anymore. A governor who wanted to start again wouldn’t be flipping a switch; he’d have to rebuild the whole apparatus, in public, one piece at a time.

Thirteen executions is thirteen too many, in my book — I’m against the whole business, and I’ve argued the point from another direction on this blog. But even if you’re for the death penalty, be honest about what “it” is in California. It isn’t a punishment. It’s a threat the state makes and never keeps, kept on the books so that nobody ever has to say out loud that it ended.

And if you want the argument made at full length, it isn’t mine you should read — it’s The Ultimate Punishment, a six-part series by Courtney Heard, who writes as Godless Mom. She pointed me to it herself, years ago, when the two of us got to talking about the death penalty. It’s linked at the bottom. Read it.

Whatever Newsom signed today, the death penalty in California had already died of neglect. He just signed the certificate.

Read more

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation — condemned inmate list and capital punishment statistics (tenure, deaths on the row, last execution)

Death Penalty Information Center — executions by state since 1976 (Texas 603; Florida 144)

CNN / USA Today / Wall Street Journal, Nov 5, 2026 — Newsom’s commutation announcement, the 548 figure, and the California Supreme Court review required for 382 of the cases

Godless Mom (Courtney Heard), The Ultimate Punishment (2015) — a six-part series dismantling the death penalty’s standard defenses one at a time, starting with the Tookie Williams case: https://www.godlessmom.com/post/the-ultimate-punishment-part-one-introduction