Reported by Al Jazeera
Gavin Newsom cites concerns over morality, high costs, human error as he grants largest mass clemency in US history.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that he will commute the sentences of all 548 people on death row in the state, the largest mass clemency in United States history.
The announcement on Thursday effectively clears out California’s death row , although the state has not executed a prisoner for 20 years. Those on death row will instead serve life sentences without the possibility of parole.
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“I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us,” Newsom said in an open letter.
Support for the death penalty in the US has largely declined since the 1990s, although it still holds majority backing.
A Pew Research Center poll released in August found that 66 percent of Americans supported the punishment for those convicted of murder. Roughly 73 percent, however, acknowledged there was a risk of executing an innocent person.
Because death penalty cases often involve long and arduous legal appeals, many of those on death row are never executed.
Twenty-three states have banned the practice outright, and others have effectively abandoned it even if the punishment remains on the books.
Still, President Donald Trump, a Republican, has championed the death penalty for serious federal crimes. In April, his administration pledged to expand the use of federal executions, including by employing firing squads.
While proponents of the death penalty have argued that the punishment has a deterrent effect, critics say decades of scholarship indicate otherwise.
They have also pointed to ethical and logistical issues, including the expense.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), California has spent $6bn on the death penalty since 1978 while carrying out just 13 executions in that time.
Capital punishment has also been criticised for being applied disproportionately to racial minorities and for the frequency of botched executions .
The DPIC says that, since 1973, at least 203 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the US have…