It’s a horrific crime. Seven lives were taken in a mass shooting on the farms of Half Moon Bay. The accused, Chunli Zhao, now faces the death penalty—marking the first time in over 15 years that San Mateo County has pursued capital punishment.
But even as the case reopens long-buried pain, it also reopens something else: the door to the death penalty in California. A door that was supposedly closed.
Governor Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on executions in 2019. The execution chamber at San Quentin was dismantled. The state hasn’t executed anyone since 2006. For years, we told ourselves that California was done with death. That the death penalty was a relic—inhumane, arbitrary, racially biased, and functionally broken.
But the Zhao case proves otherwise. So does the decision by Los Angeles County’s new district attorney to begin seeking the death penalty again. So does Alameda County’s quiet effort to withdraw dozens of resentencing petitions in tainted death penalty cases—petitions that had been championed by former DA Pamela Price to correct decades of unconstitutional conduct. And so does the national resurgence of executions: more states ramping up the machinery of death, and Donald Trump restarting federal executions when given a chance.
The trend is unmistakable: capital punishment is creeping back. Not through a public vote. Not through legislative reform. But case by case, county by county, driven by prosecutors who either never believed in abolition or have now turned their backs on it.
San Mateo DA Steve Wagstaffe hadn’t pursued a death case in his 13 years in office—until now. But make no mistake: he’s always defended capital punishment. He prosecuted multiple death penalty cases before becoming DA, including the 2009 conviction of Alberto Alvarez, who killed a police officer in East Palo Alto. And in 2021, Wagstaffe joined two other DAs in court to fight Newsom’s moratorium, arguing that counties should be allowed to carry out executions on their own. The court rejected the effort.
The truth is, California’s death penalty has always been a legal contradiction. We keep people on death row but don’t execute them. We condemn hundreds to die but offer no timeline for when or how. We hold symbolic executions in name only, with none of the finality. And despite this charade, we allow prosecutors to keep seeking death—as if the system still functions.
But what’s the point? There is no evidence that the death penalty deters mass shootings. Zhao, like every mass shooter before him, was not calculating the risk of lethal injection when he opened fire. Much of the time, mass shooting is a form of suicide anyway, by cop, by self, or possibly by death penalty—albeit prolonged.
The death penalty doesn’t protect the public—it doesn’t even deliver justice in the ways prosecutors claim. Instead, it drags families through decades of litigation, appeals, and uncertainty. It compounds trauma. It costs more than life without parole. And it amplifies racial and geographic inequities.
More than one-third of California’s death row prisoners are Black. Most come from just a few counties—Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino—that have aggressively pursued death sentences over the years. Now, even more counties are rejoining their ranks. What we’re seeing is not the reassertion of justice—it’s the reassertion of prosecutorial power.
In Alameda, the death penalty is doubly fraught. Former DA Price launched an effort to revisit dozens of death sentences marred by prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias, and constitutionally defective trials.
That effort is now being reversed by DA Ursula Jones Dickson, who is not only trying to withdraw the resentencing motions but bury decades of tainted practices in the process. Her actions signal a wholesale rejection of the reform mandate Price was elected to carry out—and a quiet return to a “win at all costs” culture that defined Alameda for decades.
Meanwhile, on the national stage, executions are on the rise again. In 2023, the U.S. carried out 24 executions, with even more states ramping up activity in 2024 and 2025.
Already 19 people have been executed in nine total states.
Moreover, some are returning to firing squads. Some are experimenting with new lethal drugs.
The first Trump administration executed 13 people in its final months in office. And while Biden cleared most of death row as he left office, Trump is already seeking to ramp things up.
So where does that leave California?
If we’re going to be honest, the moratorium hasn’t abolished the death penalty. It’s merely postponed it. Prosecutors can still seek it. Judges can still impose it. People are still being sentenced to die. The death chamber may be closed, but the courtroom door is wide open.
We must decide: are we a state that clings to the illusion of death as justice? Or are we finally ready to let go of a punishment that has proven time and again to be cruel, costly, and ineffective?
California may have stopped the death penalty.
But now, it’s coming back—one case at a time.
