California governor commutes sentences of more than 500 people on death row - British Caribbean News

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : "Governor Newsom's announcement marks a decisive moment in the history of the death penalty in the United States.
47% : Support for the death penalty in the US has largely declined since the 1990s, although it still holds majority backing.
47% : The state continues to have the largest death row in the country.
45% : The states of Washington and California, for instance, were among the first to pass "three strikes" laws in the early 1990s, punishing repeat offenders with high minimum sentences.
41% : 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.
40% : While proponents of the death penalty have argued that the punishment has a deterrent effect, critics say decades of scholarship indicate otherwise.
39% : Those on death row will instead serve life sentences without the possibility of parole.
38% : The announcement on Thursday effectively clears out California's death row, although the state has not executed a prisoner for 20 years.
36% : 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.
34% : Newsom's decision will reduce the number of people on death row nationally by nearly 30 percent.
33% : "By bookending his time as governor first with a moratorium and now this mass clemency, Governor Newsom has irrevocably changed California's relationship with the death penalty.
31% : In 2019, he also vetoed a measure that would have limited cooperation between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and prison authorities, and a similar bill failed in the state Senate in 2022.
30% : Still, President Donald Trump, a Republican, has championed the death penalty for serious federal crimes.
29% : Capital punishment has also been criticised for being applied disproportionately to racial minorities and for the frequency of botched executions.
25% : 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.
21% : In 2022, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have placed limits in state prisons on the use of solitary confinement, a practice defined as torture by the United Nations after certain lengths of time.

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