SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson praised Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to commute the death sentences of 548 incarcerated people to life imprisonment without parole, calling the move “a remarkable act of moral leadership” and arguing that the death penalty has failed because of racial discrimination, wrongful convictions and arbitrary sentencing.
In a New York Times opinion essay published Nov. 13, Stevenson, a public interest lawyer who has helped secure reversals, relief or release for more than 140 people wrongly sentenced to death, defended the commutations as a necessary response to longstanding injustices in the American capital punishment system.
“The death penalty in America is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit,” Stevenson wrote. “It is about whether our imperfect governments deserve to kill.”
Stevenson acknowledged the suffering of victims’ families and the anger expressed by some law enforcement officials following Newsom’s decision, but argued that life imprisonment without parole would continue to impose severe punishment.
“No one disputes that people on California’s death row have been convicted of horrific crimes,” Stevenson wrote. “Many law enforcement officials and survivors of victims have understandably expressed anger about these commutations.”
Stevenson said he understood that anger through his own experience of losing his grandfather to murder when he was 16.
“I understand the rage and pain that violent crime produces,” Stevenson wrote. “But we must reject the policy of blood for blood. The men and women who were on California’s death row will be severely punished without the death penalty.”
Stevenson also pointed to the financial costs of capital punishment in California, arguing that the state has spent billions of taxpayer dollars and devoted substantial judicial and legal resources to maintaining a system that has not carried out an execution in two decades.
He noted that California’s homicide rate has declined significantly during that period, challenging the argument that executions are necessary to protect public safety.
Beyond California, Stevenson argued that the modern death penalty has been undermined by wrongful convictions, racial disparities and unreliable legal proceedings.
“The modern death penalty has been a complete failure,” Stevenson wrote. “It is characterized by wrongful convictions, racial bias, unreliable proceedings and arbitrary and unjust sentencing.”
He cited the exonerations of more than 200 people who had been sentenced to death in the United States, noting that approximately one person has been exonerated from death row for every eight people executed.
“This astonishing failure ratio would never be tolerated in aviation, food safety or virtually any other area of public policy — but executions persist,” Stevenson wrote.
Stevenson traced those problems to the history of capital punishment and the Supreme Court’s handling of constitutional challenges to the death penalty.
In 1972, the Supreme Court effectively halted executions nationwide through its ruling in Furman v. Georgia, finding that the arbitrary and unreliable application of capital punishment violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Stevenson argued that the ruling confronted a system in which Black people and poor defendants, particularly in Southern states with histories of racial discrimination, had faced disproportionate punishment.
Rather than abandoning capital punishment, states developed new sentencing procedures intended to address the constitutional problems identified by the court.
Four years later, the Supreme Court upheld revised death penalty statutes, allowing executions to resume under a new legal framework.
Stevenson argued that the resulting system failed to eliminate the racial disparities and arbitrary sentencing practices that had prompted the earlier constitutional intervention.
He pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1987 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, in which the court considered statistical evidence of racial disparities in capital sentencing but rejected a constitutional challenge based on that evidence.
According to Stevenson, the court treated racial disparities as “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system,” rather than requiring states to address the unequal application of capital punishment.
Stevenson also cited a lawsuit filed in the California Supreme Court in 2024 that presented empirical evidence of racial disparities in the state’s death penalty system.
According to the evidence cited in the litigation, Black defendants were up to 8.7 times as likely and Latino defendants up to 6.2 times as likely to receive death sentences compared with other defendants.
“It is impossible to claim a commitment to racial equality while authorizing executions in the face of such evidence of systemic bias,” Stevenson wrote.
Stevenson further criticized the methods used to carry out executions, arguing that recent cases have exposed the physical suffering associated with capital punishment.
He described botched executions in which “condemned people writhe, gasp for air, moan and struggle before death,” pointing to what he characterized as increasingly troubling examples of the cruelty of execution practices.
Stevenson also criticized the Supreme Court, arguing that it “has largely abandoned its oversight role in ensuring that states carry out the death penalty constitutionally.”
With federal judicial oversight increasingly limited, Stevenson argued that governors have a responsibility to exercise their clemency powers when capital punishment produces unjust outcomes.
He expressed hope that Newsom’s decision would “encourage other elected officials to be more active guardians of justice.”
“Protecting the powerless and despised frequently comes with harsh and bitter political backlash,” Stevenson concluded. “That’s true for any act of principled and moral leadership.”
Stevenson urged other governors and elected officials to follow Newsom’s example by using their authority to commute death sentences to life imprisonment.
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