When California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on executions in 2019, he said that the state’s “death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure.” He explained that the death penalty “has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, Black and brown, or can’t afford expensive legal representation…[while providing] no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent.” In 2024, California courts agreed that execution was not the appropriate punishment for at least 45 people on the state’s death row. In total, approximately 58 people were removed from death row last year, including those who died before execution — a nearly 10% single-year decrease in the population of the largest death row in the country. As a result, California’s death row population fell below 600 for the first time in 25 years.
In the two Bay Area counties of Santa Clara and Alameda, district attorneys concerned about racism and due process in the administration of the death penalty conducted reviews of all eligible death sentences in their jurisdictions. The resulting changes in sentences in those counties alone account for almost two-thirds of the state’s resentencings in 2024.
In Santa Clara County, District Attorney Jeff Rosen invoked his power under state law to recommend resentencing “in the interest of justice.” He had earlier pledged in 2020 not to seek new death sentences, saying that he was profoundly influenced by racial justice protests and a visit to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Alabama, where he saw the connections between capital punishment and the history of slavery and mass incarceration. DA Rosen has called clearing Santa Clara’s death row of its prisoners his “second and final step”:
