Newsom Is Weighing Commutation for 563 Death Row Inmates After a Tennessee Execution Failed

“I have to prepare for my own consciousness test, my own rocking chair test,” Gavin Newsom said on his podcast. Then the question he has been putting to his advisers for months, in what the Times described as a flurry of phone calls, meetings and Zoom conversations: “Do I commute the largest death row in the western hemisphere?” On Wednesday, California’s police chiefs sent him their answer.

On Sept. 30, Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The IV team went through about 10 needles trying to establish access in both her arms, and staff warned that some veins may have ruptured. Two doses of the barbiturate pentobarbital failed to kill her. She was taken to a hospital, spent days on a ventilator, and did not regain consciousness for five days. She survived, and was returned to prison.

Within a week of Pike surviving, Newsom had “ramped up conversations with top advisers,” the Times reported, citing people familiar with his thinking. A deliberation that had been running for months became, within a week of Pike surviving, a sprint of phone calls, meetings and Zoom conversations around the governor. The Sacramento Bee reported that public opinion had shifted in the week since the botched execution. A Reuters/Ipsos poll completed Oct. 19 found a country genuinely unsure what a failed execution should mean: 33% said the state should try again, 39% said the prisoner should instead serve life, and overall support for the death penalty stood at 55%, down from 63% in 2017. No option commands a majority.

The number at the center of all this is 563, California’s death row and the largest in the country. The Death Penalty Information Center put the national condemned population at 1,973 as of July 1, which means one signature from Newsom would remove about 28.5% of America’s death row in a stroke, dropping the national count to roughly 1,410. The precedent everyone cites is Illinois Gov. George Ryan, who commuted 167 sentences in 2003. What Newsom is considering would be more than three times that, the largest clearing of a death row in modern American history.

The police chiefs’ letter, sent Wednesday by the California Police Chiefs Association, named the people behind the number. “These are the worst of the worst — individuals who committed horrific murders and were sentenced to death by juries after hearing the evidence,” said Tustin Police Chief Sean Thuilliez, the association’s president. The letter’s roll call includes Richard Allen Davis, convicted in 1996 of kidnapping and murdering 12-year-old Polly Klaas, and serial killer Charles Ng, convicted of 11 first-degree murders. Both convictions are decades old. “The governor is considering taking those sentences away and replacing them with a punishment that offers no guarantee these murderers will spend the rest of their lives in prison,” Thuilliez said. “That is outrageous, and it is an insult to the victims and families who have waited decades for justice.”

Commutation, as the Times’ reporting lays it out, converts death sentences to life in prison without parole — it does not open prison doors. The “no guarantee” warning points somewhere else: El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson and former Sacramento County DA Anne Marie Schubert argue in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that Newsom’s parole board has created a pathway toward possible release for eligible prisoners serving life without parole, and that a commuted prisoner, though currently excluded, can ask a future governor for further clemency. For families, they write, that uncertainty means “another hearing, another account of their loved one’s murder and another plea for accountability.”

Newsom leaves office in January, with roughly two and a half months left to decide. A mass commutation would need California Supreme Court approval for inmates with multiple felony convictions. Topo Padilla, president of Crime Victims United, put the scale in jurors: 563 cases mean 6,756 individual jurors who reached unanimous verdicts. “What a slap in the face to those who sit on juries now or in the future,” he said. The prosecutors’ op-ed adds that California voters twice rejected repealing the death penalty, in 2012 and 2016, and passed a 2016 measure to speed up executions. Thuilliez made the succession argument explicit: “This is not his decision alone to make. The next Governor, the Legislature, victims’ families, and the people of California deserve to have their voices heard.”

“We are absolutely disgusted that this governor would be contemplating and most likely doing the commutation of people that are on death row when a judge and a jury have decided that that is the penalty,” Padilla said. He reads the timing as politics, not conscience: Newsom, he said, is “weighing it based on what the polls might do as he starts to run for president.” The governor’s office, through spokesperson Diana Crofts-Pelayo, offered the standing answer: “Governor Newsom has been clear about his position on the death penalty since his first year in office, when he ordered a moratorium on executions. He believes the intentional killing of another person is wrong.” Among the public, the split runs through individuals. “I am not a supporter of the death penalty, so I am inclined to be supportive of him,” said Deborah Churton, one of several people KTVU interviewed at the Larkspur Ferry Terminal. “I think we need to get above the killing mentality, and so I don’t agree with death as a penalty,” said Judy Mason.

Tennessee’s execution protocol orders a second dose of pentobarbital when the first fails to cause death. It does not say what officials are supposed to do if the prisoner survives the second dose too.