Andrew Wagner was at the gym scrolling through social media on Thursday night when he found out the man who murdered his friend would never face the sentence a jury imposed. Not because of new evidence. Not because of a legal appeal. Because Gavin Newsom decided 548 death row inmates in California deserved mercy — all of them, all at once, no exceptions.
Wagner's reaction, published as an opinion piece in the New York Post on November 8, puts a human face on a number the governor would prefer to keep abstract.
Newsom announced the mass commutation on November 5, converting every death sentence in California to life without parole. It is the largest mass clemency in American history — more than a quarter of every condemned inmate in the entire country, wiped from death row by one man's signature. "I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California's values," Newsom said, a line that reads less like conviction and more like a bumper sticker when you consider what it cost the people he never consulted.
California's voters had a chance to abolish the death penalty in 2016. They rejected it. The same ballot included a measure to accelerate executions. Voters approved that one. Newsom's commutation doesn't reflect California's values. It overrides them.
Topo Padilla, president of Crime Victims United, put the conflict plainly: "I don't think he or any person should undo the sentence rendered by a jury and signed off by a judge because of his personal beliefs or feelings." That's the core of it. Twelve jurors heard the evidence in each of these 548 cases. A judge confirmed the sentence. Newsom reversed all of them in a single afternoon.
Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer, a Republican, described the action as "mercy for the wolves while inflicting the ultimate act of cruelty on the sheep." Former Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert, now president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, argued that clemency "requires examining each case on its merits, not treating hundreds of distinct judgments alike." Newsom did the opposite — he treated a serial killer and a single-count murderer as interchangeable entries on a spreadsheet.
The governor's office points to systemic inequality. "You're better off in this country to be rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent," Newsom said, citing the fact that Black inmates make up roughly one-third of California's death row despite representing about six percent of the state's population. Eight people have been exonerated from California's death row since 1973. That's eight cases where the system failed — and 540 where Newsom is asserting it failed without proving it.
Marc Klaas knows what failure looks like. His 12-year-old daughter Polly was kidnapped and murdered in 1993. Her killer sat on California's death row. Klaas opposes the commutations. His stepdaughter Jess Nichol has taken a different view, supporting rehabilitation programs and saying the execution "has absolutely nothing to do with my recovery or with real public safety." One family, split by the same crime, arriving at opposite conclusions. Newsom's blanket order made the decision for both of them.
California has spent $6 billion on its death penalty system since 1978 and executed 13 men. That's roughly $460 million per execution — a staggering inefficiency that death penalty opponents cite as evidence the system doesn't work. But the system's failure to carry out sentences isn't an argument for eliminating the sentences. It's an argument for fixing the process. The state's own data shows 391 death row inmates — 70 percent — were still waiting for a lawyer to be appointed as of the end of 2025. The bottleneck wasn't the penalty. It was the bureaucracy.
Newsom issued a moratorium on executions in 2019. He had San Quentin's execution chamber dismantled the same year. He redistributed male death row prisoners to 24 other facilities in 2024. The commutation wasn't a sudden act of conscience. It was the last step in a seven-year project to make the death penalty disappear without ever putting it to a vote he knew he'd lose.
Andrew Wagner found out at the gym. Five hundred and forty-eight families found out the same way — scrolling, reading, realizing that the sentence a jury imposed had been erased by a man who never sat through the trial.