Governor Newsom:

Your decision to commute every death sentence in California—548 of them—is an act of breathtaking arrogance and moral inversion. With a single stroke of the pen, you have substituted your personal preferences for the repeated will of California voters, the verdicts of juries, the judgments of courts, and the long-sought finality owed to the families of the murdered. This is not justice. It is a unilateral nullification of the law by a lame-duck governor more interested in progressive applause and a future presidential primary than in the victims he claims to remember.

California voters have spoken clearly and repeatedly. In 2012 and again in 2016 they rejected ballot measures that would have abolished the death penalty. They chose to keep the ultimate penalty on the books for the worst crimes. You acknowledge as much in your letter, then immediately discard it. The Constitution gives governors clemency power for extraordinary individual cases of injustice or mercy. It does not authorize a mass rewrite of every capital sentence because the occupant of the office finds “state-sanctioned killing” aesthetically or ideologically distasteful. You have turned a narrow constitutional safety valve into a veto of the electorate and the criminal justice system itself.

The people whose sentences you have erased are not abstract symbols. They include Richard Allen Davis, who kidnapped and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas; serial killers such as Randy Kraft and Charles Ng; and others convicted of the most aggravated murders imaginable—child killers, cop killers, and those whose crimes involved torture, multiple victims, or extreme cruelty. Juries, after reviewing the evidence, decided death was the appropriate punishment. You have decided otherwise because it better suits your conscience and your political brand. Marc Klaas, Polly’s father, has called this a gift of life to those who stole it from their victims and an allyship with the worst offenders. Other victims’ families have described the announcement as soul-hurting, a slap in the face, and a destruction of the finality they were promised. Many learned of it the same way the public did. That is not consultation. It is contempt. Your justification—that the system is imperfect, expensive, and cannot be applied with perfect fairness—applies to every serious criminal punishment. If imperfection is the standard, no conviction stands. Life without parole is not the sentence the juries imposed; it is the sentence you prefer. The practical reality that California has not executed anyone since 2006 does not erase the distinction. The death sentence carried moral weight, a measure of accountability, and a form of finality for survivors. You have removed it categorically, including for cases that required no further judicial review of the underlying guilt, while leaving the death penalty nominally legal so that future prosecutors may still seek it under a continuing de facto ban. This is theater, not principle.

You describe the decision as among the most difficult of your career and claim it reflects “California’s values.” The values of the people who vote, serve on juries, and live with the consequences of violent crime are not identical to the values of a progressive governor eyeing a national run. Timing the announcement in your final months, after elections, and in a form that will please a Democratic primary electorate while shifting the hard questions to the state Supreme Court for the majority of cases that require its approval, is transparent politics. You alone bear responsibility, as you say. The public should treat it as such.

The families of the victims deserved better than a press release and an open letter invoking abstract values while their loved ones’ killers receive a categorical reprieve. California’s justice system is imperfect; every human institution is. That does not license one elected official to erase hundreds of jury verdicts because he finds the lawful penalty personally objectionable. Your action does not make the state stronger, more just, or more decent. It makes a mockery of the process that produced those sentences and of the voters who refused to abolish them.