Death penalty staggers toward an end in California

So this week, our retiring governor did the right thing and commuted the sentences of 548 convicted criminals who have been sitting awaiting execution on California's death row for decades. Per Gavin Newsom's order, their sentences are changed to "life without possibility of parole".

Right wingers are screaming that Newsom's action is a plot to let dangerous men go free, but not so. According to the San Francisco Chronicle's Bob Egelko who has been covering the death penalty arguments for decades ...

... under legally binding regulations enacted in July by the state parole board — Title 15, Section 2843 b(6) — any inmate whose sentence has already been commuted by the governor “is not eligible” for another commutation, which the inmate would need to become eligible for parole. 

For these criminals, the threat of capital punishment is over. It's possible that under California law that determined local pro-death prosecutors could still bring new cases and new offenders could be given death sentences -- but would the exorbitant cost, financial and emotional, really be worth it? The incoming governor, Xavier Becerra, is no supporter of the death penalty any more than Newsom.

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I spent 2012 working for the ACLU, trying to persuade the California electorate to end the death penalty by popular vote. We failed. I do think we persuaded most of the state's opinion leaders and major media that capital punishment was hopeless, costly, irrational, uncertain, and just not worth what it did to the state. But a majority of voters disagreed. They disagreed again in 2016. There has not been an execution in the state since 2006. Newsom can claim he has finally brought the state into line with reality.

I learned a tremendous amount from working to persuade and organize voters around the death penalty. A full write up of those conclusions appears here.  Two of my thoughts about that campaign hold up well: 

For some people, the mere existence of a death penalty amounts to a promise from the government that justice will be done in response to hideous crimes. Many people feel this instinctively... [now I'd say without reflection]

Many people, including many of those who cling to the death penalty as an expression of the state's commitment to justice, barely know anything about it. ... 

The death penalty isn't exactly dead and buried in California, but Newsom has moved us much closer to a definitive end.