SACRAMENTO, Calif. — As Gov. Gavin Newsom considers commuting California’s remaining death sentences, research examining the experiences of murder victims’ families, the selection of people for capital punishment and racial disparities in sentencing is raising questions about some of the central assumptions underlying the death penalty.
The research challenges the idea that victims’ families share a common view of executions or that death sentences are consistently reserved for people who commit the most aggravated murders. Those questions are also at the center of a pending legal challenge alleging that California’s death penalty system operates in a racially discriminatory manner.
The debate surfaced following a Davis Vanguard article about the possibility that Newsom could commute the sentences of 563 people currently facing execution in California.
Former Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert responded on Facebook, urging readers to consider the suffering of victims’ families and the severity of crimes committed by people sentenced to death.
Schubert cited the murder of 8-year-old Michael Lyons by Sandy Friend, arguing that the facts of individual cases and the decisions of juries should not be overlooked in discussions about clemency.
She also warned that some advocates seeking to eliminate capital punishment favor abolishing life without the possibility of parole.
“And never forget that for some…getting rid (of) Life Without Parole is the next step,” Schubert wrote.
Her comments reflect a longstanding argument among capital punishment supporters that death sentences recognize the severity of particularly brutal crimes, respect jury verdicts and provide justice for victims and their surviving families.
However, research examining the experiences of homicide survivors suggests that victims’ families do not necessarily share the same views about punishment, even when they have experienced comparable losses.
One of the most extensive examinations of those differences appears in Jody Lyneé Madeira’s 2012 book, Killing McVeigh: The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure, which examines the experiences of survivors and victims’ families following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Timothy McVeigh was convicted of carrying out the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which killed 168 people. He was executed by lethal injection in June 2001.
Madeira examined how victims’ families and survivors responded to the bombing, participated in criminal proceedings and understood the meaning of justice and closure.
Her research documented substantial differences among survivors over whether McVeigh should be executed, whether they wanted to witness his execution and whether carrying out the sentence would provide emotional resolution.
Some survivors supported the execution, while others opposed it or questioned whether it would contribute to their healing.
Madeira’s findings challenged the assumption that victims’ families constitute a unified constituency in capital punishment debates or that executions necessarily provide the closure frequently invoked in arguments supporting the death penalty.
Additional research has examined whether capital punishment produces better outcomes for homicide survivors than sentences of life without parole.
In a 2012 study published in the Marquette Law Review, researchers Marilyn Peterson Armour and Mark S. Umbreit compared homicide survivors in Texas, which permits capital punishment, and Minnesota, which does not.
Their study, Assessing the Impact of the Ultimate Penal Sanction on Homicide Survivors: A Two-State Comparison, found that survivors in Minnesota whose cases had been adjudicated reported better physical, psychological and behavioral health outcomes than their counterparts in Texas.
The researchers identified the prolonged legal process associated with capital punishment, including appeals and repeated court proceedings, as a potentially important factor in survivors’ experiences.
Although the findings do not establish that life without parole produces better outcomes for every family, they challenge the assumption that executions automatically promote healing.
The research also raises questions about whether the victims’ families most visible in capital prosecutions necessarily represent the broader population of homicide survivors.
Prosecutors frequently develop relationships with victims’ families during criminal proceedings, but the available research does not establish whether those relationships disproportionately involve families who favor capital punishment.
A separate body of research has challenged another longstanding justification for the death penalty: that capital punishment is reserved for the most aggravated murders and the people considered most culpable.
In a 2019 study published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, researchers David Baldus, George Woodworth, Catherine Grosso, Michael Laurence, Jeffrey Fagan and Richard Newell examined 27,453 California murder and manslaughter convictions involving offenses committed between 1978 and 2002.
The researchers found that California’s death penalty statute made approximately 95% of first-degree murder convictions eligible for capital punishment under the state’s 2008 statutory framework.
Yet only 4.3% of death-eligible cases resulted in death sentences.
The findings suggest that California’s capital punishment system does relatively little to narrow the category of murders eligible for execution, leaving substantial discretion over which cases ultimately result in death sentences.
The researchers examined whether California’s system complied with constitutional requirements intended to prevent arbitrary and inconsistent application of capital punishment.
The findings do not establish that every person sentenced to death is less culpable than someone who received a lesser sentence. They do, however, raise questions about whether the legal system consistently identifies a narrowly defined category of the most aggravated cases.
The question has constitutional significance because the U.S. Supreme Court has required states to establish standards limiting the arbitrary imposition of death sentences.
In Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court invalidated existing death penalty systems in 1972, and subsequent decisions required states to establish procedures intended to narrow eligibility and guide sentencing decisions.
California’s unusually broad eligibility provisions have been the subject of continuing legal and academic scrutiny.
The question of who receives a death sentence is further complicated by research identifying racial and geographic disparities in capital punishment.
A 2024 study published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies by Catherine Grosso, Jeffrey Fagan and Michael Laurence examined more than 27,000 California murder and manslaughter convictions between 1978 and 2002.
After controlling for factors including defendant culpability and statutory aggravating circumstances, the researchers found that Black and Latino defendants were substantially more likely to receive death sentences than similarly situated white defendants.
The study found that Black defendants faced between 4.6 and 8.7 times the odds of receiving a death sentence compared with similarly situated defendants, depending on the statistical model.
Latino defendants faced between 3.2 and 6.2 times the odds.
The researchers also found that the race of the victim affected charging and sentencing outcomes.
People convicted of killing at least one white victim faced significantly higher odds of receiving a death sentence than those convicted of killing victims of other races, even after accounting for other legally relevant factors.
The findings identified disparities at multiple stages of the capital punishment process, including prosecutors’ decisions to pursue death-eligible charges and juries’ decisions to impose death sentences.
A separate study examining California homicides and death sentences between 1987 and 2019 also identified substantial geographic disparities, finding that the likelihood of receiving a death sentence varied significantly among counties.
That research found that racial disparities persisted across counties, although their magnitude varied geographically.
The findings suggest that the decision to impose capital punishment is influenced by more than the facts of the crime, including where a case is prosecuted and the race of the accused and the victim.
Those concerns are now part of a major legal challenge to California’s death penalty system.
In April 2024, the California Office of the State Public Defender, the Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations filed a petition in the California Supreme Court alleging that the state’s death penalty statutes are administered in a racially discriminatory manner.
The case, Office of the State Public Defender v. Bonta, argues that California’s capital punishment system violates the equal protection guarantees of the state Constitution because of persistent racial disparities in charging and sentencing.
The petition relies on statewide and county-level research documenting disparities associated with the race of defendants and victims.
In 2026, the California Supreme Court advanced the challenge, directing that the matter proceed to an evidentiary hearing in Sacramento Superior Court.
The decision did not determine that California’s death penalty system is unconstitutional. Instead, it allowed the petitioners’ allegations to proceed for further examination.
The challenge has drawn opposition from prosecutors who dispute the requested statewide remedy and argue that the legal claims should not result in wholesale invalidation of the state’s capital punishment laws.
The Office of the State Public Defender has published the petition and related legal filings.
The litigation introduces another dimension into the debate over whether Newsom should commute California’s remaining death sentences.
While Schubert and other capital punishment supporters have pointed to the severity of individual murders and the decisions of juries, the research underlying the legal challenge examines whether the system selects people for execution consistently and without racial discrimination.
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The studies do not dispute that people sentenced to death have been convicted of serious crimes. Rather, they examine why some people convicted of death-eligible murders receive death sentences while many others do not.
The research also raises questions about the relative treatment of victims.
If cases involving white victims are more likely to result in death sentences, the findings suggest that the criminal justice system has not imposed capital punishment uniformly across cases involving victims of different races.
That issue intersects with the research on victims’ families, which documents divergent views about executions and challenges assumptions about what surviving relatives need from the justice system.
Together, the studies identify two separate questions: whether victims’ families share a common position on capital punishment and whether the people selected for execution represent a consistently defined category of the most aggravated cases.
California has not carried out an execution since 2006, and Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions in 2019.
A commutation of existing death sentences to life without parole would prevent those individuals from being executed while leaving them incarcerated without eligibility for parole.
Such action would not eliminate life without parole as a sentencing option, although some criminal justice reform organizations separately advocate abolishing that punishment.
Newsom has not announced a final decision on whether to commute the remaining death sentences.
As the governor considers the issue, the pending racial discrimination challenge and decades of research into capital sentencing provide a broader context for evaluating the consequences of maintaining or commuting death sentences.
The studies document significant variation in the experiences and preferences of victims’ families, the broad range of cases eligible for capital punishment and disparities in the selection of people ultimately sentenced to death.
Those findings do not resolve the policy debate over capital punishment, but they raise questions about whether executions consistently reflect the wishes of victims’ families or a sentencing process determined primarily by the severity of individual crimes.
For California, those questions now extend beyond public debate into the courts, where the state’s system of capital punishment faces a constitutional challenge based on evidence of racial discrimination.
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