In a speech delivered in Rome in October 2017, Pope Francis told the crowd that “No matter how serious the crime that has been committed, the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and the dignity of the person.” One year later, he updated church doctrine using the same phraseology.
So, it wasn’t surprising that earlier this month, seven years after the speech in Rome, the pope told California Gov. Gavin Newsom “how proud he was of the work we’re doing [with the moratorium] in California” during a climate summit in Vatican City. However, in an interview with the LA Times soon after he spoke with the pope, Newsom said he was surprised “because I wasn’t anticipating that, especially in the context of this convening.”
Newsom announced a moratorium on the state’s death penalty and ordered the gas chamber to be dismantled in an executive order issued in March 2019. In addition, in March, 2020 the state began a voluntary program of transferring individuals on death row to prisons throughout the state. Today, almost all of the 638 death-sentenced individuals have been moved, with CDCR estimating that the final few people still on death row will be transferred within the next week or so. The 528 single-person cells in San Quentin’s East Block, which housed all those sentenced to death except women, will soon be empty, and East Block will be torn down or renovated.
Newsom has done more than any other governor in California history to reform the state’s death penalty. As to whether he will grant clemency to those on death row who are eligible, i.e., anyone who hasn’t been convicted of felonies in two separate cases, Newsom hasn’t commented. Clemency for those convicted of two or more felonies would have to be approved by a majority of the state Supreme Court.
