State Spotlight: California Death Row Shrinks Sharply in 2024, Driven by the Resentencing of At Least 45 People to Life Sentences or Less

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.¹

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.² 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”: 

In Alameda County, a fed­er­al judge ordered then-DA Pamela Price to review the cap­i­tal con­vic­tions of 34 peo­ple after the dis­cov­ery of index cards in the file of Ernest Dykes, a Black man sen­tenced to death in 1995, show­ing that pros­e­cu­tors struck Black and Jewish jurors from his tri­al based on their race and reli­gion. A Black female prospec­tive juror was described as a ​“Short, Fat, Troll,” while a pros­e­cu­tor wrote of a Jewish prospec­tive juror: ​“like him bet­ter than any oth­er Jew, but no way.” Subsequent inves­ti­ga­tions revealed that coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors had rou­tine­ly and sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly exclud­ed Black and Jewish jurors for over two decades. Eighteen peo­ple sen­tenced to death in the coun­ty were resen­tenced to life sen­tences or terms of years last year, fif­teen of them peo­ple of col­or, while six­teen cas­es remain pending. 

According to the California Appellate Project, courts also cit­ed racial bias in sev­er­al resen­tenc­ings in oth­er coun­ties. During clos­ing argu­ments in Edgardo Sánchez-Fuentes’ tri­al in Los Angeles County, the pros­e­cu­tor called Mr. Sánchez-Fuentes, an immi­grant from Honduras, a ​“Bengal tiger.” Then-DA George Gascón con­ced­ed last year that the argu­ment vio­lat­ed the state’s Racial Justice Act, and fur­ther stip­u­lat­ed that Mr. Sánchez-Fuentes has an intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, exempt­ing him from exe­cu­tion. During Keone Wallace’s appeals for his cap­i­tal con­vic­tion in Fresno County, a pros­e­cu­tion expert used the fact that Mr. Wallace is Black to deter­mine which intel­li­gence test to admin­is­ter, vio­lat­ing the Racial Justice Act. Both men had been sen­tenced to death for offens­es com­mit­ted when they were only 21. 

On July 2, Larry Roberts became the 200^th per­son exon­er­at­ed from death row in the United States. He had been sen­tenced to death in 1983 for the mur­der of a pris­on­er and a guard while incar­cer­at­ed in Solano County on unre­lat­ed charges; the only evi­dence against him was the tes­ti­mo­ny of oth­er pris­on­ers. A fed­er­al court found that pros­e­cu­tors had sup­pressed excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence and pre­sent­ed tes­ti­mo­ny they knew was false. Mr. Roberts also expe­ri­enced one of the longest waits of any­one exon­er­at­ed from death row before his name was cleared: 41 years, near­ly a half-cen­tu­ry, had passed. 

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) report­ed that 13 death-sen­tenced peo­ple died on death row this year, the largest num­ber on record except for 2020, when 19 pris­on­ers died (at least a dozen due to a COVID-19 out­break in San Quentin State Prison). The ages of those who died in 2024 ranged from 40 to 88, and they had been on death row for between one and 36 years, for an aver­age of 21 years. Only 13 peo­ple have been exe­cut­ed in California in the mod­ern era of the death penal­ty, while over ten times that num­ber — 180 peo­ple — have died on the state’s death row. Over twice as many con­demned peo­ple have com­mit­ted sui­cide in California as have been exe­cut­ed in the state. 

The high num­ber of resen­tenc­ings and deaths last year result­ed in the largest sin­gle-year change in California’s death row pop­u­la­tion since the NAACP began track­ing in 1991. The NAACP’s Winter 2025 Death Row USA or ​“DRUSA” report esti­mates that 591 peo­ple are cur­rent­ly on death row in California, down from 641 last year, while the Habeas Corpus Resource Center (HCRC) puts the cur­rent num­ber slight­ly low­er at 574. The CDCR, whose esti­mate includes peo­ple who have been offi­cial­ly resen­tenced but are await­ing trans­fer, num­bers its death-sen­tenced pop­u­la­tion at 598 as of ear­ly February 2025. DPI’s esti­mate of 58 peo­ple removed from death row rep­re­sents a near­ly 10% decrease in the state’s con­demned pop­u­la­tion in a single year. 

Based on DRUSA records, the last time California’s death row pop­u­la­tion was below 600 peo­ple was in 2000. The pop­u­la­tion peaked at 743 in the mid-2010s and has declined sig­nif­i­cant­ly, by about 150 peo­ple (20%), since Gov. Newsom took office in 2019 and imposed a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions. (California has not con­duct­ed an exe­cu­tion since 2006.) At least 70 peo­ple have been resen­tenced or died since Gov. Newsom ordered the state’s death row facil­i­ty at San Quentin to be dis­man­tled in ear­ly 2022. While this move did not change the sta­tus of any­one sen­tenced to death, it is per­ceived as part of a broad­er reform plan pur­sued by Gov. Newsom’s admin­is­tra­tion to phase out the use of the death penal­ty. Eligible death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers may seek to trans­fer to oth­er state pris­ons to be clos­er to fam­i­ly and access bet­ter resources relat­ed to reha­bil­i­ta­tion, employ­ment, and legal support. 

According to the California Appellate Project, trends in last year’s new death sen­tences also illus­trat­ed declin­ing pub­lic sup­port for the death penal­ty. There were three new death sen­tences in 2024, all in sub­ur­ban Southern California coun­ties, com­pared to four in 2023. Only six of the state’s 58 coun­ties (10.3%) have sen­tenced any­one to death in the last five years. (The death penal­ty has long been char­ac­ter­ized by geo­graph­i­cal dis­par­i­ties and iso­lat­ed use; see DPI’s Lethal Election and The 2% Death Penalty reports for more infor­ma­tion.) Racial dis­par­i­ties in out­comes, how­ev­er, remain: accord­ing to a forth­com­ing HCRC report, 19 of the 23 statewide death sen­tences (83%) since Gov. Newsom’s 2019 mora­to­ri­um were imposed on Black or Latino peo­ple. The state pop­u­la­tion is 40% Latino and 6% Black. 

California is not unique in its declin­ing use of the death penal­ty. According to a recent report by the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP), Texas’ death row pop­u­la­tion shrunk in 2024 com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year, and the num­ber of new death sen­tences remained in the sin­gle dig­its. This decline reflects pros­e­cu­tors’ increas­ing reluc­tance to bring new cap­i­tal cas­es and juries’ grow­ing reluc­tance to sen­tence indi­vid­u­als to death. 

And along with the large reduc­tion in California’s death row pop­u­la­tion and its falling num­ber of new death sen­tences, homi­cide rates appear to have decreased in the state in 2024 — fur­ther under­min­ing the the­o­ry that use of the death penal­ty deters crime. Though deter­rence has his­tor­i­cal­ly been cit­ed as a key jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the death penal­ty, stud­ies con­sis­tent­ly show that states that do not use the death penal­ty have low­er homi­cide rates. The FBI’s data for January through June 2024 showed that crime rates fell in California cities for the third year in a row fol­low­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, and homi­cide rates decreased by 14.9%. In San Francisco, the city at the heart of the metro area where most of the resen­tenc­ings took place, homi­cides through the first half of 2024 fell a stun­ning 39% com­pared to the first half of 2023. An October 2024 report from the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice not­ed that the FBI data rep­re­sent­ed California’s low­est rates ever record­ed for homi­cide and con­clud­ed that the ​“crim­i­nal jus­tice reform era is asso­ci­at­ed with con­tin­ued reduc­tions in both incar­cer­a­tion and crime.”