SACRAMENTO, California — Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Thursday, November 5, that he is commuting the death sentences of all 548 people on California's death row — the largest mass clemency in American history, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), which based its report on the governor's open letter issued the same day. With a single decision, Newsom wiped out the biggest death row in the United States and cut the national death-row population by nearly 30 percent: about 1,388 people now remain under sentence of death across the whole country, the lowest number since 1984. The commuted sentences become life in prison without parole, according to statements summarising the grants — none of the 548 will be released, but none will be executed either.

Source: Death Penalty Information Center, November 5, 2026

"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 all of us," Newsom said in the statement announcing the decision. The move bookends his governorship: just two months into his first term in 2019, Newsom declared a moratorium on executions, calling the death penalty a "failure" and citing persistent racial discrimination, high costs and the risk of human error. California has not executed anyone in more than 20 years — but until Thursday it kept sentencing people to a death row that never carried out its sentences.

A $6 billion system that executed 13 people in 48 years

The numbers behind the decision are stark. California spent an estimated $6 billion on the death penalty since it was reinstated in 1978 and carried out just 13 executions in that time, DPIC reported. Los Angeles County alone sentenced 319 people to death, and about 174 of them were still on death row when Newsom acted. Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties together account for 50 percent of California's death row — those three counties have sentenced more people to death than any entire state outside California. Two-thirds of the people under sentence of death in California were sentenced more than 20 years ago, and according to a May 2026 report by the state's Habeas Corpus Resource Center, 70 percent of death-row prisoners are still waiting just to be appointed a lawyer to appeal their sentences, because funding and qualified counsel are so scarce.

The racial breakdown of the row Newsom cleared is part of the argument his supporters have made for years. Of the 548, about 33 percent are Black, 32 percent white, 29 percent Latino, 4 percent Asian and 1 percent Native American, DPIC reported. Eight people have been exonerated from California's death row — all of them men of colour. The ACLU, which applauded Thursday's announcement, noted that it and other groups sued in April 2024 to challenge California's death penalty statute as racially discriminatory and unconstitutional under the equal-protection guarantees of the state constitution; that legal challenge was still working through the courts as the governor acted on his own authority.

How the commutations work: one-third now, the rest after Supreme Court review

A commutation is not automatic for everyone at the same speed, because California law splits death-row cases into two groups. The governor can commute unilaterally in cases where the prisoner has no additional felony convictions, so roughly one-third of the 548 grants apply immediately. For prisoners with multiple felony convictions — about two-thirds of the row — the California Supreme Court must review and approve the clemency before it becomes final, the ACLU and DPIC both explained. Those reviews will now proceed case by case, but the direction is set: this is the seventh time in the modern era that a US governor has granted clemency to everyone on a state's death row, and by acting for 548 people Newsom has more than doubled the total number of clemencies granted in capital cases in the last 50 years combined.

The announcement drew immediate support from an organised coalition that had campaigned for exactly this outcome. Clemency California said murder victims' families, law-enforcement figures and civil-rights leaders backed the decision, and DPIC reported that days before the grant, 50 murder victims' family members signed a letter urging Newsom to grant universal clemency. Among them was Jess Nichol, whose sister Polly Klaas was murdered by one of the men granted clemency: "I won't pretend I've always opposed the death penalty. I used to think the man who killed my sister deserved execution. But over time I've realized that whether he's executed has absolutely nothing to do with my recovery or with real public safety," she said. Robin Maher, DPIC's executive director, called it "a decisive moment in the history of the death penalty in the United States," adding that no governor had ever granted universal clemency at this scale.

Opponents of the move reacted just as fast. Conservatives Concerned, a national group critical of the decision, issued a statement on November 5 through its executive director Demetrius Minor describing the commutation of all 548 sentences to life without parole as a major blow to capital punishment — a sign that even the decision's critics recognise its scale. The split in reaction runs through victims' families themselves: some, like Nichol, campaigned for clemency, while victims' advocates elsewhere in California's long death-penalty debate have argued for decades that final sentences should be carried out. Both positions were on the record Thursday; what is not contested is that no other single clemency action in US history has covered this many people.

Why it matters in the Central Valley and across diaspora California

California is home to the largest Punjabi community in the United States — in Fresno, Sacramento, Stockton, Bakersfield, Yuba City and San Jose — and its criminal-justice decisions land directly on readers' home state. Three of the counties that produced half of death row (Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside) sit alongside Central Valley counties whose courts have also sent people to death row over the decades. For families following the system from inside — as defendants' relatives, as victims' relatives, or as taxpayers funding a $6 billion system — Thursday's decision closes the execution question for all 548 current cases while leaving the men and women concerned in prison for the rest of their lives. Newsom is in the final stretch of his governorship — Californians elected Xavier Becerra as the next governor on November 3 — so the incoming administration inherits a death row with no one left awaiting execution once the court reviews finish.

What happens next is procedural but consequential. The California Supreme Court will review the roughly two-thirds of grants that involve multiple felony convictions, converting them in batches; the one-third that took effect immediately are already final. The 2024 racial-discrimination lawsuit against the death-penalty statute continues in the background, and any future repeal still has to go to voters at a ballot — where it lost narrowly in 2012 and 2016. Politically, the fight now shifts to those future campaigns and to whether district attorneys keep seeking death sentences that, after Thursday, lead to a row one governor has already emptied. For the 548 people concerned, however, the decision is already made: their sentences end in prison, not in the execution chamber.