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Gavin Newsom signs the executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty in California.
Gavin Newsom signs the executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty in California. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP
Gavin Newsom signs the executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty in California. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP

'The death penalty is wrong': California governor halts all state executions

This article is more than 5 years old

‘I cannot sign off on executing hundreds and hundreds of human beings,’ Gavin Newsom said

California’s governor has issued a moratorium on capital punishment in the US’s most populous state, providing a reprieve for hundreds of inmates sentenced to death.

On Wednesday morning, Gavin Newsom signed a new executive order that puts in place a moratorium on the death penalty, meaning 737 inmates awaiting execution in California will not be put to death during the governor’s tenure.

“I cannot sign off on executing hundreds and hundreds of human beings, knowing that among them will be innocent human beings,” Newsom said during a news conference about the decision. “I believe the death penalty is wrong and I am exercising my right pursuant to the will of the voters and the constitution,” he added.

The order withdraws the state’s controversial lethal injection protocol and requires the immediate closure of the execution chamber at San Quentin state prison, Newsom said, adding that the equipment was already being hauled away, as he addressed a crowd of reporters at the state capital.

The governor’s decision brings California in line with Colorado, Oregon and Pennsylvania – all of which have governor-issued moratoria – and adds momentum to a national movement working to end capital punishment.

California has the biggest death row population in the country, with one in four US inmates on death row incarcerated in the state. Twenty-five of the death row prisoners have exhausted all appeals.

“Symbolically it is very significant,” Robert Dunham, the executive director of the not-for-profit Death Penalty Information Center, told the Guardian. “It tells us a lot about the state of the death penalty in the United States when two of the five largest death rows in the country have moratoria on executions and one-third of everybody on death row is incarcerated in a state that has a moratorium.”

There has not been an execution in California since 2006, amid a years-long legal battle over the state’s drug cocktail. Federal courts ordered a halt to executions until the California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR) could ensure its lethal injection protocol was administered without risk of exposing inmates to excessive pain.

The CDCR issued a new protocol in January of last year, and that protocol, too, has faced legal challenges. With a judge’s approval, however, executions could quickly resume in the absence of the executive order. “We’re poised to potentially oversee the execution of more prisoners than any other state in modern history,” Newsom said in an interview with the LA Times before issuing the moratorium.

Newsom has long been a vocal critic of capital punishment. His administration argues that capital punishment has been a failure, pointing at pervasive inequality running through the US criminal justice system, the significant number of innocent people who have been wrongfully convicted, and evidence that the costly system does not increase safety.

A US Government Accountability Office study published in 1990 found a vastly increased likelihood of a death sentence when the defendant was a person of color and the victim was white. A 2005 study cited by the governor’s office concluded it was three times more likely a conviction would result in capital punishment if the victim was white and not black.

More than 60% of prisoners awaiting execution in California are people of color. Death row inmates are also much more likely to have a mental illness, brain damage or brain injury, or to be intellectually disabled.

“There is a lot of literature and studies out there that show that the death penalty is a deeply broken system for a lot of different reasons,” the American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Shilpi Agarwal said.

Newsom’s executive order is set to regulate executions until he leaves office. But in order to have lasting impact, the reprieve should be used to find a more permanent solution, Durham says.

“In a state like California, where no one has been executed for more than a decade, a moratorium with nothing more is largely symbolic,” Dunham says. “If it is accompanied by other action, then we are looking at something more significant – it may provide some breathing space for the state to meaningfully address the huge systemic problems in its capital punishment system.”

Legislators, meanwhile, are hoping to give voters another chance to end the death penalty once and for all. The state assemblyman Marc Levine announced his support for Newsom’s decision by sharing that he and 23 colleagues had introduced a constitutional amendment to repeal capital punishment, which would require all existing death penalty cases to be resentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. If approved by two-thirds of the legislature, it will be on the ballot in 2020.

Californians do not have a strong consensus on capital punishment but have narrowly upheld it each time the issue has been put to a vote. Most recently, in 2016, voters passed Proposition 66, a measure designed to fast-track the legal process for executions, but rejected Proposition 62, an initiative that would have repealed the death penalty.

That’s why some death penalty proponents are pushing back on the governor’s decision.

“The people have voted for the death penalty 11 times since 1972, including three times in the last seven years,” said the California Criminal Justice Legal Foundation director, Kent Scheidegger. “The governor’s decision to grant a blanket reprieve to prevent executions is an abuse of power and a slap in the face of the families of murder victims.”

Newsom emphasized during his announcement that he was acting under rights endowed to him by voters and the California constitution, but acknowledged how divisive the issue was in the state.

“I did this with a heavy heart, with deep appreciation for the emotions that drive this issue and I did it with the victims in mind,” he said. But, he added, “this is the right thing to do.”

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