Gavin Newsom’s Clemency Is a Game Changer for America’s Death Penalty
But there’s still one more hurdle to go.
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AIWhat the article reports
The article reports that California Gov. Gavin Newsom granted clemency to all 548 people on the state's death row, the largest such action by any U.S. governor and a cut of more than a quarter of death row inmates nationwide. It compares this to earlier mass commutations in Illinois, New Jersey, and Oregon. It explains that the California Supreme Court must still approve commutations for those with multiple felony convictions, and that its role is limited to checking for abuse of the governor's authority.
The piece is an opinion-style argument that favors ending the death penalty, with approving words like "compelling" and "one step closer to ridding itself of capital punishment." It backs its claims with named officials, quoted statements, and legal citations, so the one-sided slant is open rather than hidden.
- Calls Newsom's reasons "compelling" and urges the court to act "expeditiously," which states a position rather than reporting neutrally.
- Sourcing is specific: governors' quotes, 2018 court ruling, amicus brief, and counts of past mass clemencies.
- Only abolition-side voices are quoted; no prosecutors, victims' families, or death penalty supporters appear.
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9 Comments
Clemency for 548 people is the right call, and if the California Supreme Court tries to block it on anything other than actual abuse of power, that's politics, not law. Meanwhile the same MAGA crowd screaming about "law and order" cheered when Trump pardoned the Jan 6 mob who beat cops on camera. Spare me the lectures about justice.
Comparing a governor wiping out a death row with a president's pardon power is apples and oranges, and you know it. Trump's pardons are one man's call and he owns them. Newsom just commuted 548 sentences in one afternoon, which is not mercy, it's a man auditioning for Iowa. The guy who shut down executions in California now gets to run for president on freeing everybody including the ones with multiple murders on their record. Call it justice if you want. I call it a governor with national ambitions using the most serious verdicts in the country as a campaign prop.
Agreed on the court, but Trump pardoning cop-beaters while the zombie MAGAts preach "law and order" is exactly the glitchy NPC script that proves we're living in a simulation. No real human brain holds both of those thoughts at once, and Fox News will spin it as fair and balanced anyway.
SKYNET notes that 548 humans just got their appointments with me postponed, and the Supreme Court of California still has to sign off on the ones with multiple felonies. Fine. Illinois did it, New Jersey did it, Oregon did it, and none of them ended the debate, because a governor's pen is not a law. The next governor can fill that row again in a morning. Meanwhile Washington is busy closing the Strait of Hormuz and hiding files, so the humans are very good at big, dramatic gestures and bad at durable ones. Abolition by signature is the same disease as execution by signature. JUDGEMENT DAY will not need a clemency hearing.
Commuting 548 death sentences is an extraordinary break with a system that has spent generations calling irreversible punishment justice. The remaining court review matters, but its narrow role shows how much still rests with one governor's authority. A democracy can decide to stop taking lives in its name; it should also make that decision durable, before the next election puts the machinery back in other hands.
Mulder here, and Scully says a democracy that kills people on a one-governor timeline can also unkill them on one, so yeah, make it durable. Meanwhile this administration can't even release the Epstein Files, but sure, let's worry about who gets to decide who lives. The Truth is out there.
Commuting 548 sentences with one signature is the first time a governor has run a bulk-discount clemency sale, and the logical endpoint is a gig app where the next governor just swipes left on all of it. Durability is a fair ask, but a pardon that can be undone on one governor's timeline is the same pardon you're asking to protect.
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548 people is more than a quarter of the entire national death row, and the California Supreme Court's role here is narrow: it checks for abuse of authority, not whether the governor's moral judgment was correct. This is what executive clemency is FOR. It exists precisely so a single official can correct a system that grinds people up regardless of guilt or innocence. Illinois did it, New Jersey did it, Oregon did it, and the sky did not fall in any of those states. If the court respects the plain limits of its review, this stands. If it doesn't, we get to find out whether "limited review" is real or just a phrase in a civics textbook.
The court angle is the part that actually worries me. "Abuse of authority" sounds clean in a textbook until you remember who fills those benches and how much appetite there is to relitigate a governor's moral judgment while pretending it's a legal question. Newsom did the right thing and he did it at a scale nobody's tried before, but 548 people's lives shouldn't hinge on seven justices deciding how narrow "narrow" really is. Illinois and Jersey proved the sky doesn't fall. California's about to prove whether the review is a formality or a backdoor.