Gov. Gavin Newsom to halt death penalty despite voter efforts to hasten executions

Gov. Gavin Newsom will sign an executive order Wednesday placing a moratorium on the death penalty for all 737 inmates on California’s death row, ensuring that no executions will take place while he is governor, an administration source has confirmed.

Newsom’s order also will withdraw the state’s lethal injection protocol and immediately close the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison. The action, however, leaves intact all convictions and sentences, and does not provide for the release of any inmates, the source said.

“The intentional killing of another person is wrong. And as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual,” Newsom said in a prepared statement obtained by the Southern California News Group. The action can be undone by a future governor.

“I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people,” said the Democratic governor. “In short, the death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian.”

Critics, however, say Newsom’s order undermines the will of the voters in California.

In November 2016, Californians passed a measure to speed up executions, the last of which occurred 13 years ago. Most of that measure, Proposition 66, was upheld by the state Supreme Court and a judge was reviewing California’s lethal injection protocol, which Newsom withdrew Wednesday.

As lieutenant governor, Newsom backed a competing ballot measure in 2016 to repeal the death penalty, which voters rejected.

“The arguments were fully and vigorously presented, and the people made their choice,” Kent Scheidegger, the legal director for the pro-death penalty Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, wrote in a December blog post. “They chose to mend it, not end it.”

Prosecutors: ‘Ill-considered’

The Association of Deputy District Attorneys on Tuesday blasted Newsom’s pending move.

“Governor Newsom, who supported the failed initiative to end the death penalty in 2006, is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty,” said a statement by Michele Hanisee, president of the association that represents 1,000 prosecutors in Los Angeles County.

Still, Newsom has indicated he believes voters are not happy with the death penalty.

“In California, we have the largest death row of any place in the Western Hemisphere — more than 700 prisoners,” he said. “And we have spent $5 billion since 1978 to keep those individuals on death row.”

‘Significant leap’ for opponents

Natasha Minsker, a lawyer who worked on death penalty issues in the state for more than a decade at the ACLU, called Newsom’s order “a significant leap forward for the movement to end the death penalty, both in California and across the country.”

“We have been asking for a governor in California to show leadership on this issue for a long time,” she said in an interview.

Newsom’s order recalls his decision just a few weeks into his first term as mayor of San Francisco ordering city officials to marry same-sex couples in 2004 — a move that won him national attention but was ultimately overturned in the courts.

This time, he appears to be on more solid legal ground: The state constitution clearly allows governors to delay executions, Minsker said.

Notorious killers on death row

The last person executed in California was in 2006. Clarence Ray Allen, 76, convicted of killing three people, died by lethal injection.

Among some of the most notorious killers awaiting execution in California are:

• Kevin Cooper, an African-American convicted in the 1983 slayings of a Chino Hills couple, their child daughter and a neighbor boy. The conviction has been dogged for decades by claims that police planted evidence. Newsom signed an executive order in February calling for further DNA testing in the case.
• Rodney James Alcala, 75, who was condemned in 2010 for five killings in the late 1970s, including a 12-year-old Huntington Beach girl. He later pleaded guilty to two more murders and received a life sentence in prison.
• Randy Kraft, likely California’s most prolific serial killer. Kraft may have killed as many as 65 young men in Oregon, Michigan and California during a 13-year span that ended in 1983. He was convicted of killing 16 men.
• Lawrence Bittaker, who was convicted in the kidnap, torture, rape and murder of five teenage girls plucked off South Bay streets over a five-month period in 1979. Bittaker, who committed the killings with a partner, Roy Norris, is now 78. Norris escaped the death penalty by testifying against Bittaker.

California has the most people on death row, one in four of the nation’s condemned. Twenty-five death row inmates in California have exhausted all their appeals.

Newsom, in his prepared statement, said there were many reasons for blocking efforts to restart California’s death chamber.

Newsom: System ‘a failure’

“Our death penalty system has been — by any measure — a failure,” he said. “It has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or can’t afford expensive legal representation. It has provided no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent. It has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars.

“But most of all,” Newsom said, “the death penalty is absolute. Irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error.”

Since 1973, five of the condemned in California were found to be wrongfully convicted and exonerated.

Newsom argued the death penalty is unfair and unequally applied based on race and mental disability.

More than six in 10 people on California’s death row are people of color. Additionally, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, at least 18 of the 25 people executed in the United States in 2018 were mentally ill, brain injured, and/or had an IQ in the intellectually disabled range. Some had chronic serious childhood trauma, neglect, and/or abuse.

Said Newsom, “There’s a reason why, today, three out of four countries around the world have either abolished the death penalty or no longer use it. In America, we execute more human beings than any other democracy on earth. Just in 2017, the United States joined Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Pakistan, China and Egypt as the world’s top executioners.”

3 other states have moratoriums

Democratic governors in three other states — Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania — have put similar moratoriums on the death penalty in recent years. Washington governor and presidential candidate Jay Inslee also declared a hiatus on capital punishment in his state in 2014, but the state’s Supreme Court invalidated Washington’s death penalty altogether last year.

The newly elected Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, also has repeatedly delayed several executions this year as his state tries to reform its lethal injection system, although he has not imposed a moratorium.

Newsom’s decision could elevate the debate over capital punishment to the national political stage as well. President Donald Trump has escalated his Twitter jabs at Newsom in recent months, and has professed his support for the death penalty.

California presidential hopeful and Sen. Kamala Harris also opposes the death penalty, and has already faced questions about her stances on the issue as state attorney general.

During the gubernatorial race last year, Newsom said he hoped to eventually put the death penalty before the voters again, and predicted that they would vote to abolish it.

“We need to have a more sustainable conversation with the public, and I would like to lead that,” he said in an April 2018 interview with the Bay Area News Group. “We haven’t had a governor, with respect, that’s led this conversation. There’s been a lot of timidity on the death penalty.”