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Gov. Gavin Newsom commuted the death sentences of all 548 people on California’s death row on Thursday, converting each one to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Death Penalty Information Center calls it the largest mass clemency in American history.
The order empties the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere and wipes out roughly a quarter of the country’s death sentences in a single afternoon. California’s Constitution requires the state Supreme Court to sign off on clemency for anyone convicted of two or more felonies, so 382 of the cases now go to the justices.
Newsom made the announcement in a three-page open letter to Californians. “These offenders will die in prison but not by our hand,” he wrote. State-sanctioned killing, in his words, “diminishes each of us.”
He ended the letter by saying he was “compelled to follow my conscience.” Anyone who has followed his career knows where that conscience was formed.
Newsom is a Catholic who graduated from the Jesuit-run Santa Clara University, and he has opposed executions for close to thirty years in public life. Two months after taking office in 2019, he halted executions statewide and had the lethal-injection chamber at San Quentin taken apart.
He also governs in a long Catholic line. Jerry Brown, his predecessor and mentor, studied for the priesthood as a Jesuit seminarian before leaving for Berkeley, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who held the office before Brown, was raised Catholic in Austria. On Tuesday, voters chose Xavier Becerra, another Catholic, to succeed Newsom; Becerra has committed to keeping the moratorium on executions in place.
Pope Francis noticed what Newsom was doing. When the governor came to the Vatican for a climate summit in May 2024, the pope “immediately brought up the issue of the death penalty,” Newsom told Catholic News Service, and spoke of “how proud he was of the work we’re doing in California.”
Newsom welcomed Francis’s successor warmly. After the cardinals elected Robert Prevost in May 2025, the governor said he prayed the new pope’s voice “becomes a bridge — between faiths, nations, and beliefs — and a force for peace rooted in our shared humanity.”
On Thursday he answered a question Leo has been putting to Catholics in public life since long before he became pope.
The Church’s answer is no longer in doubt. In 2018, Francis revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church to teach that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” and that the Church works “with determination for its abolition worldwide.” Leo, whom Francis made a cardinal in 2023, has carried that revision into his own pontificate.
This April, hours after the Justice Department revived the firing squad for federal executions, Leo sent a video message to DePaul University in Chicago marking fifteen years since Illinois abolished the death penalty. “I likewise offer my support to those who advocate for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States of America and around the world,” he said.
The message carried a personal history. In 2011, as prior general of the Augustinians, Prevost wrote to Gov. Pat Quinn to thank him for signing that repeal.
Leo has also refused to file the death penalty in a separate drawer from abortion. Asked at Castel Gandolfo in September 2025 about Cardinal Blase Cupich’s plan to honor Sen. Dick Durbin, he put it in one sentence: “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life.”
He had made the same argument in Peru two years before the conclave. Accepting an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Católica Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo in Chiclayo in 2023, Prevost said a Catholic “cannot truly claim to be ‘pro-life’ by maintaining a stance against abortion while simultaneously advocating in favor of the death penalty.”
As I reported last month, the Chiclayo footage sat on YouTube for years, unnoticed by the conservative researchers who combed Prevost’s record before the conclave. It shows a man formed by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s consistent ethic of life, the “seamless garment” that will not set the unborn child against the condemned prisoner.
That garment fits Newsom only in part. His strong support for abortion rights puts him at odds with the very teaching that grounds Thursday’s order, and Leo’s logic cuts in both directions. Still, a Catholic governor just spared 548 lives at real political cost, and the Church should say so plainly.
The cost is real. Newsom is weighing a 2028 run for the White House, and conservative outlets spent Thursday publishing the names and crimes of the condemned. Topo Padilla, president of Crime Victims United, told CalMatters that no one “should undo the sentence rendered by a jury.” Newsom conceded in his letter that the decision “will anger and hurt some Californians,” and he wrote that it “will always weigh heavily on me.”
Washington is moving the other way. The Trump administration has spent the year expanding federal executions, and Pete Hegseth floated livestreaming an execution this fall before the plan was walked back. Tennessee, meanwhile, botched Christa Pike’s execution in September over the pleas of its own bishops.
In his message to DePaul, Leo said that “the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed.” A Catholic governor wrote that conviction into the law of the country’s largest state on Thursday, and his Catholic successor has promised to keep it there. It is good to see.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and every Catholic and person of goodwill who believes that no crime, however grave, can erase the dignity God gave a human being.
The Gospel does not ask us to forget the victims of terrible crimes. It asks us to grieve alongside their families while refusing the lie that another killing will heal the first one. California chose mercy on Thursday, and the American Church has every reason to name it.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that protects life from the womb to death row, whatever it costs. Our government is building firing squads and planning livestreams, and that hunger keeps growing.
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A distraction from his support for Israel, which has killed 300,000 Palestinians.
In the aftermath of the debacle in TN, and in consideration of Hegseth's recent flirtation with public executions, we should all sign on to Mr. Justice Blackmun's 1994 assertion that he would "no longer tinker with the machinery of death." Yet on the very day that Governor Newsome commuted 548 death sentences, the states of Indiana, Florida, and Alabama all carried out executions. In the anti-abortion movement, advocates often – usually – note that the victims of abortion are innocent; but the church’s pro-life teaching is rooted not in innocence but in human dignity. The church teaches that human beings, even those guilty of heinous crimes, do not lose the human dignity conferred on us at conception; we retain it from ‘womb to tomb’ – to natural death. Our pro-life activism must always reflect that belief.