SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Gov. Gavin Newsom is preparing to spare the lives of the more than 550 people serving death sentences in California prisons, according to a letter obtained by The Sacramento Bee.

The New York Times reported last month that Newsom was considering the possibility of commuting the sentences of California’s 548 death row prisoners as one of his final acts as governor. Newsom is termed out of office in early January and is openly considering a run for president in 2028.

“After nearly 30 years in public office, I have come to understand the limits of what government can justly accomplish,” Newsom said in the letter. “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.”

Commuting a person on death row reverts their sentence to life without parole. As governor, Newsom can commute single-felony sentences, but must receive the California Supreme Court’s approval to commute sentences for people with multiple convictions.

Four of the seven justices must approve those requests, though there is no time limit for them to do so. If they do not approve before Newsom leaves office on Jan. 3, 2027, the requests lapse and do not roll over to the next governor, according to attorney Natasha Minsker, an anti-death penalty advocate.

“This would be the largest number of commutations in one go. California has one-quarter of all death sentences in the United States, the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere,” Minsker said. “So it would be by far the largest act of clemency, in a really historic move.”

In 2024, when former President Joe Biden commuted 37 prisoners facing the death penalty, advocates from the ACLU to Catholic bishops called upon Newsom to do the same.

Last week, the Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood, who advises men on death row, wrote to the governor to consider sparing death row inmates, calling it a “moral moment.”

“The silence after the very breath of a human is violently wrestled out of them is deafening,” Hood said in a statement Thursday. “I’ve heard it 14 times. Today, Governor Newsom has courageously chosen to break that silence. These commutations represent the height of moral leadership. Cruelty laid down. Now, I’m left with one prayer: God, don’t let any of the governors in the other executing states get any sleep until they find the ethical stamina to follow Newsom’s lead.”

California has not executed a prisoner in 20 years and the death penalty has been on hold since 2019, when Newsom issued a moratorium via executive order. At the time, he said the decision to pause executions was the result of a 40-year moral journey informed by his Irish Catholic faith. Newsom’s successor, governor-elect Xavier Becerra, said he would maintain the moratorium.

Newsom has opposed capital punishment since his days as San Francisco mayor, citing the death penalty’s burden on people of color and the possibility of executing innocent people. In 2008, he supported then-District Attorney Kamala Harris’ decision to pursue life without parole over the death penalty for Edwin Ramos, an undocumented gang member from El Salvador who shot and killed a father and his two sons in a case of mistaken identity.

As lieutenant governor, he supported two initiatives to repeal the death penalty. In 2020, he signed legislation that made it easier for prisoners to challenge their convictions over racial bias in their sentencings. In 2024, he discussed his death penalty opposition with Pope Francis I during a trip to the Vatican.

Black people make up almost a third of death row prisoners, despite comprising 5% of the state population. And additionally, the death penalty costs the state millions to implement, “causing a strain on our finances,” Minsker said. “That is money that’s not improving the lives of anyone in California. It’s certainly not making California a safer place, and that those are funds that should be redirected.”

While California voters have twice rejected repealing the death penalty, public support has waned nationwide in recent years. Tennessee recently paused the practice after prisoner Christa Pike, who was convicted of torturing and killing a classmate in 1995, survived two rounds of a botched lethal injection.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation dismantled the death row chambers at San Quentin, the state prison that once held some of the U.S.’s most notorious prisoners, and renovated it into a rehabilitation center. The prisoners held there have been transferred to other state prisons.

Newsom’s blanket commutation request includes notorious prisoners like Charles Ng, Richard Allen Davis, and Cary Stayner. In July, the state Supreme Court upheld Stayner’s conviction and death sentence for killing four women in 1999 while working as a handyman in Yosemite.

Ng, along with his accomplice Leonard Lake, tortured and killed at least a dozen people at their Calaveras County cabin in the 1980s. Lake died by suicide after arrest and Ng fled to Canada. He was extradited in 1991 and sentenced to die in 1999.

Davis received the death penalty in 1996 for brutally kidnapping and killing 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993, after he had been released following convictions for other violent crimes. That helped bolster support for California’s three-strikes law, which voters approved in 1994.

Marc Klaas, Polly’s father, has since emerged as a Newsom critic, after the 2019 execution moratorium and more recently during the failed 2021 recall.

“Baby killers, cop killers, spree killers and serial killers have all found an ally in Gavin Newsom,” he told Fox News last month. “It’s unbelievable that he would side with the most heinous individuals in our society.”

The governor has crossed swords over public safety and criminal justice with members of his own party on a handful of occasions.

More recently, Newsom has resisted calls to fund Proposition 36, a ballot measure that levies harsher penalties for petty crime that voters overwhelmingly approved in 2024.

He opposed the measure at the time and behind the scenes his then-chief of staff, Dana Williamson, railed against a group of prosecutors led by former Ventura County District Attorney Greg Totten for not agreeing to delay the proposal to 2026, according to emails obtained by CBS Sacramento.

Williamson left Newsom’s office at the end of 2024 and pleaded guilty earlier this year to bank fraud, filing a false tax return and lying to the FBI for her role in a federal corruption scheme.

The coalition she sparred with, the California District Attorneys Association, came out against blanket commutation last month.

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