How would it feel if someone murdered your family in cold blood, was caught, convicted, and sentenced to death row, only to be rewarded in a blanket pardon at some later date, enacted by a lame, politically-motivated figure who doesn't understand the grief or the intimate details of any of these serious cases.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided that the worst killers in his state (people a jury once judged deserving of death) will instead be fed, housed and doctored at public expense until old age claims their lives. On Nov. 5, the term-limited Democrat announced plans to commute all 548 pending death sentences, the largest clemency action in state history. Some crimes are so monstrous that only death carries enough weight to answer them, and no governor’s letter can lift that weight from the families who are left behind.
Key points:
- Newsom announced Nov. 5 that he will commute all 548 death sentences to life without parole, though 382 cases need California Supreme Court approval.
- Tennessee’s failed executions of Tony Carruthers in May and Christa Pike on Sept. 30 point to poor training and sloppy oversight, not a flaw in the death row sentence itself.
- A 2011 study put California’s capital system at $4 billion more than life without parole since 1978, with 13 executions to show for it, but price tags are a poor measure of justice.
- Prosecutors and victims’ families call blanket clemency a betrayal of juries and of voters, who rejected repeal in 2016.
When the needle fails, the verdict still stands
Tennessee supplied the spark. On May 21, executioners labored for more than an hour to establish a backup IV line for Tony Carruthers, convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, before the state called off the attempt. Then came Sept. 30. Christa Pike, 50, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for murdering a fellow student, Colleen Slemmons. Pike survived two poorly administered doses of pentobarbital and was hospitalized before returning to prison on Oct. 10. Gov. Bill Lee has since halted those executions.
Reporting by the Nashville Banner and the Nashville Scene indicates the protocol Tennessee adopted in 2025 reduced training in IV placement, and the state had already halted an execution once before after acknowledging it failed to test its drugs properly. Amherst College law professor Austin Sarat said lethal injection “has the highest rate of being botched” of any method used in the past 140 years. Ohio’s Romell Broom endured 18 needle sticks in 2009 before officials called it off.
Here is what the abolitionist headlines skip. Incompetence by state employees is an argument for competence, not abolition. A sentence imposed by a jury after a full trial does not evaporate because a bureaucracy fumbled around on a human vein.
The ledger cannot balance the grief
But these failures are not the reason Newsom wants to end death row. Newsom’s open letter argues that “state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values.” California’s voters have not agreed. The governor declared a moratorium on death row sentences in March 2019, and the last execution occurred in 2006, yet in 2016 voters rejected a repeal through Proposition 62 while approving Proposition 66 to speed up death sentences. Most of the commutations cannot take effect until the state Supreme Court acts, because 382 of the 548 inmates have more than one felony conviction and need a recommendation from at least four justices. Newsom wants that ruling by year’s end, before he leaves office in January.
Some believe the strongest underlying argument for commutation is money. A widely cited 2011 study found California’s capital system cost taxpayers $4 billion more than life without parole would have since 1978, a sum that bought 13 executions, and death row cost $184 million more each year.
Much of that expense flows from decades of appeals, which Proposition 66 aimed to shorten. Life without parole carries its own bill, too. Fortune estimated the state spent roughly $1.7 million per prisoner over the 46 years Charles Manson sat in custody. Even so, a ledger cannot balance the real-life torture and grief that victims face as their killer lives on and on and is rewarded through commutation of their sentence.
San Luis Obispo District Attorney Dan Dow warned that blanket commutation would be a “slap in the face” to murder victims and their families, and Marc Klaas, father of murdered Polly Klaas, has called the plan a betrayal of victims and voters. The California District Attorneys Association noted that life without parole does not foreclose future appeals or clemency, leaving families in lasting uncertainty.
Taxpayers in California will now underwrite indefinite incarceration for killers whose crimes made their victims’ families strangers to peace, while the survivors pay in tortured memory. Justice, as Dow argued, is individualized, and a single sweeping order flattens every case into one.
Mercy is a virtue, but the final dispensing of it belongs to God. Some sins, such as the murder of a child or the slow torment of the helpless, exceed any court’s power to repair and any governor’s power to absolve. Only God can forgive those who repent, but consequences must be followed through. The state’s narrower duty is to render a proportionate judgment, and sometimes that judgment is death.
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