Gavin Newsom’s Big Move on the Death Penalty
· The Atlantic
Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he will commute the sentences of every prisoner on the state’s death row—548 people in all. With this action, Newsom could effect the largest-ever reduction of America’s death-row population, dropping the national total by about 27 percent. (California’s supreme court must approve some of the clemency requests.) California last executed a prisoner in 2006, and in 2019 Newsom instituted a moratorium against the death penalty via executive order. But in both 2012 and 2016, Californians narrowly voted against ballot measures that would have repealed the state’s death penalty, meaning many in the state would still prefer to see it in use. Newsom’s commutation order could foreclose that possibility in at least the near future.
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Newsom’s commutations underscore how polarized the country has become on the death penalty. Although several states have rejected capital punishment in recent years, a handful of red states are pushing back against that trend, taking ever more extreme measures to hand down death sentences and carry out executions. America’s death-penalty landscape is defined by dueling philosophies, which means that prisoners convicted of capital crimes face radically different outcomes depending on minor changes in geography: The fate of the same person committing the same murder on either side of the border between Texas, where executions are relatively common, and New Mexico, which does not permit capital punishment, would come down to only a few miles. The death penalty in America could grow ever more arbitrary and cruel before it dissolves altogether.
[From the July 2025 issue: Inside America’s death chambers]
State executives across the country have undertaken commutation actions similar to Newsom’s in recent years. When Colorado’s legislature abolished the state’s death penalty in 2020, Governor Jared Polis commuted all remaining death sentences; likewise, Governor Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of everyone on Oregon’s death row in 2022. In 2024, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper issued 15 death-row commutations, reducing the state’s death-row population by roughly 10 percent. That same year, President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 prisoners, leaving only three still facing death at the hands of the federal government. As of 2023, Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania has maintained a de facto moratorium on executions by issuing reprieves for every death warrant that comes across his desk. And earlier this year, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a moderate Republican, granted his first death-row commutation and publicly urged his state’s legislature to abolish capital punishment altogether. Newsom’s intervention could give this trend considerable momentum.
This pattern is in some respects unsurprising. The death penalty has been in a long-term decline for decades: Support for capital punishment for murder dropped from 80 percent during the 1990s to somewhere between 52 percent and 66 percent currently, depending on the phrasing of polling questions. (Pew has detected a slight uptick in recent years.) In 1986, 325 new death sentences were handed down by juries across the country; in 2025, juries sentenced fewer than 30 prisoners to die, thanks in part to declining crime rates, criminal-justice reform efforts, and wide publicization of death-row exonerations. In recent years, several states have legislatively abolished the death penalty: New Hampshire in 2019, Colorado in 2020, Virginia in 2021, Washington in 2023, and Delaware in 2024, bringing the number of abolitionist states to 23. And the death penalty’s prospects going forward are dimming; younger generations are less likely to support it than their predecessors. America seems closer than ever to joining 74 percent of countries globally that have abandoned the death penalty—almost, but not quite.
[Elizabeth Bruenig: Donald Trump dreams of more executions]
Use of the death penalty today is concentrated in a handful of traditionally red states, among them Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Missouri, which together carried out roughly 68 percent of the country’s executions in 2025. Florida in particular has undergone a death-penalty renaissance in recent years, ratcheting up annual executions over the past two years, no longer requiring juries to hand down death sentences unanimously, and permitting the use of capital punishment to include non-homicide offenses such as the sexual assault of children. The Trump administration has also encouraged states to pursue the death penalty and has sought more federal death sentences following Biden’s mass commutations.
This year, Tennessee severely botched the attempted executions of Tony Carruthers and Christa Pike. Roughly a week after Pike survived the gruesome efforts to kill her, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the Trump administration planned to livestream the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, a prisoner on federal death row. More such horrors are still to come. But these incidents generated significant news coverage and, in Hasan’s case, mass public disapproval. Tennessee recently halted all executions, and the Trump administration backed away from livestreaming Hasan’s killing, though he will still be executed by firing squad. Reactionary efforts to shore up the death penalty might, in the end, help accelerate its decline.