Newsom Moves to Spare 548 on Death Row
The Death Penalty Is Still California Law. Good Luck Enforcing It.
Last Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he will commute every current California death sentence, all 548 of them, including six people convicted in Shasta County, to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was quick to add, "Nobody is walking free." The convictions stay on the books. And the death penalty is still California law.
What changed is the sentence those 548 people are supposed to serve. What didn't change is the political fact hanging over the announcement: California voters kept capital punishment, and a governor in the last weeks of his term is trying to empty death row through clemency. Even that isn't finished. Newsom's own office says the commutations will not take effect until the required legal steps are completed. For most on the list, the California Supreme Court still gets a say.
What the governor actually did
On Nov. 5, Newsom said he would use his constitutional clemency power to change every existing death sentence to life without parole. In a letter to Californians, he wrote, "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 added, "These offenders will die in prison but not by our hand." Many of Newsom's critics accuse him of hypocrisy given his own and the State's stance on abortion.
The governor's fact sheet is explicit about the limits. The action applies only to people currently under a sentence of death. It doesn't pardon anyone, make anyone eligible for parole, wipe out restitution, or change the underlying conviction. This isn't a jailbreak, and it isn't abolition. It's a mass reduction of existing sentences, if it holds.
Under Article V, Section 8 of the California Constitution, the governor can't commute the sentence of a person "twice convicted of a felony" without "the recommendation of the Supreme Court, 4 judges concurring." Newsom can act on his own in about 166 cases. The other 382 require a court recommendation. He has asked the justices for a blanket recommendation by year's end, before he leaves office in January 2027.
The court hasn't decided. On Nov. 9, it invited legal briefs, due Nov. 24, with the governor's response due Dec. 4. The Habeas Corpus Resource Center put it plainly after the announcement: the governor had not yet formally commuted any sentences, only said he planned to. Headlines saying death row has already been "cleared" are premature.
Shasta County is on the list
The state's official roster of death judgments, updated Oct. 30, lists six people convicted in Shasta County: William Proctor (1983), Charles Riel (1988), Robert Maury (1989), Milton Lewis (1990), Todd Garton (2001), and Scott Varner (2010). Local news media described their cases as some of the county's most notorious murders, among them the torture, rape, and murder of a Burney schoolteacher, the murder-for-hire of a pregnant wife, and the killing of a Redding woman after a carjacking.
Some local counts include a seventh name, because the crime happened here even though the trial didn't. Tomas Verano Cruz was charged in Shasta County in the 1991 murder of Deputy Sheriff Kenneth Perrigo. After a change of venue, he was convicted and sentenced to death in Sonoma County, a judgment later affirmed by the California Supreme Court.
Shasta County District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett didn't wait for the fine print. "Governor Gavin Newsom's decision is completely irresponsible and fails to take into consideration the victims, the voters, or the interests of justice," she said in a Nov. 5 statement. "Yet Governor Newsom has unilaterally overridden those decisions, to the detriment of the victims of these murders and the families who continue to live with the consequences of these crimes every day."
Still the law, effectively a paper sentence
Newsom said as much himself. "California voters have voted to keep the death penalty on the books, and I respect that," he wrote. "I recognize the limits of this clemency action, which does not repeal the death penalty and is limited to commuting California's current death sentences." Prosecutors, juries, and courts, he added, still have the discretion to seek and impose death in new cases.
The voting record isn't ambiguous. In 2016, voters rejected Proposition 62, which would have repealed the death penalty, 53.2% to 46.8%. They approved Proposition 66, which kept capital punishment and aimed to speed up appeals, 51.1% to 48.9%. Shasta County was blunter, and 56.2% voted yes on Proposition 66.
Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman drew the legal line that commuting current sentences is within the governor's power. "But that power does not extend to eliminating the death penalty. Only the Legislature or the voters can do that." A future Shasta County jury can still return a death verdict. Whether California would ever carry it out is the part that has become almost theoretical.
On March 13, 2019, Newsom signed Executive Order N-09-19. It imposed a moratorium on executions, repealed the state's lethal-injection protocol, and closed the death chamber at San Quentin. The order was a reprieve, not a repeal, and it didn't change any conviction or sentence. California's last execution was Jan. 17, 2006, when Clarence Ray Allen was put to death.
San Quentin - Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons Lethal Injection Room - Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
By 2024, condemned inmates had been moved out of the old death-row units at San Quentin and the Central California Women's Facility. A death sentence still exists as a legal category. A traditional death row waiting for a date in the chamber does not. Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra has said he'll extend the moratorium when he takes office in January. So even if the Supreme Court blocks some of the commutations, the next governor isn't lining up executions. Until some later governor does, and rebuilds a lawful execution protocol, a new death sentence in California is a verdict with no finish line.
The argument worth having
Newsom is entitled to oppose state executions, and within the Constitution, he's entitled to use clemency. Victims' families are entitled to feel that a jury's hardest decision has been set aside by one man on his way out of office. Both can be true at once.
What shouldn't be blurred is the difference between mercy and repeal. Newsom didn't ask voters to abolish the death penalty, and he didn't win that argument in 2016. He used an executive tool to reach the people already condemned and left the law standing for whoever comes next. That's legal power used at the edge of its mandate. It's also why the anger expressed by the families of the victims will sound familiar here. Shasta County voted to keep the ultimate penalty, juries imposed it for some of the worst local murders, and the state has spent years declining to carry it out.
If the Supreme Court approves most of this plan, those death sentences become life without parole. If it doesn't, many stay death sentences in name only, still stalled by a moratorium the next governor says he'll keep. Either way, California will still have a death penalty on the books.
So the question for voters is out in the open now. Do you want a punishment the state is actually prepared to carry out, or a law that survives mainly as a symbol, a campaign issue, and a sentence no one seems able to finish?
