Chammah and Castelleno then paint a grim picture of the state of the death penalty in California. They portray the 570 inmates as the victims of a racist system that is continually fed by prosecutors who insist on continuing to seek the death penalty. It’s a portrayal so lopsided that not once in their over 1700-word analysis did they ever mention the words “crime victim” once.
And as for their racism allegations—beyond stating that Black murderers were 8.7 times and Hispanic murderers 6.2 times more likely to be sentenced to death than “others,” they offer little to a reader attempting to understand the racial dynamics at work. So, while the numbers may be accurate, they are presented without the broader context necessary to determine whether they actually support the authors’ claim of a racist system.
Population share is a poor benchmark for evaluating that fact and capital punishment arises from a tiny subset of aggravated murders.
California’s racial disparity in homicide doesn’t begin on death row. It begins with who is being killed.
Given most homicides stay within racial groups – Black and Hispanic Californians are also dramatically overrepresented among homicide victims and homicide arrests. It follows then that some racial disproportionality among death-eligible defendants would exist even in a completely race-neutral system.
Racial disparities in homicide arrests actually closely track racial disparities in homicide victimization—far more closely than either tracks population demographics
From 2016-2025, 5,355 Blacks and 8,525 Hispanics were murder victims, for a total of 13,880 or 73.5 percent of all murder victims. Blacks are 5.4% of California’s population, 27.1% of homicide victims, and 29.8% of homicide arrestees; while whites are 34.2% of the population, 20.5% of homicide victims, 16.4% of homicide arrestees. Hispanics were 38.8% of the population, 46.0% of homicide victims, and 48.9% of homicide arrestees.
The Death Penalty is not driven by partisanship
The authors state that the death penalty is most often imposed in counties that are “largely Republican” and California’s death sentences are highly concentrated geographically.
But geography is not the same thing as partisanship. Five counties—Alameda, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino—account for 60% of California’s death sentences, and Los Angeles County alone accounts for 29% of death sentences imposed since 1972.
California’s death penalty plainly has a geography. Describing that geography as a phenomenon of “largely Republican counties,” however, turns a complicated county-by-county pattern into a partisan one that the numbers in their article themselves do not establish.
The effort to make California’s death penalty a partisan story runs into an obvious problem: no one need guess what Californians think about capital punishment based on their party registration. They have been asked – Twice.
In 2012, Proposition 34 asked California voters to abolish the death penalty and replace it with life without parole. They rejected it.
In 2016, Proposition 62 asked them essentially the same question. They rejected it again.
In that same 2016 election, voters approved Proposition 66, retaining the death penalty while attempting to speed its review process. Proposition 62 was unambiguous: a “yes” vote ended capital punishment; a “no” vote allowed death sentences to continue.
California is not a Republican state. Yet its voters repeatedly declined to abolish the death penalty. That doesn’t mean partisanship plays no role in attitudes toward capital punishment. It does mean that describing California’s death sentences as largely the product of “Republican counties” substitutes party affiliation for something we can measure directly.
Which brings us back to Gavin Newsom.
The question is not whether the governor has clemency power. He does. The question is what justifies using that extraordinary power to commute roughly 570 individual death sentences as a class.
These are not 570 cases sitting at the courthouse door awaiting their first review. California’s capital cases have spent years, and in many cases, decades moving through state and federal courts.
As of June, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that state prison officials reported that 75 condemned inmates had exhausted their legal appeals. When Newsom imposed his moratorium in 2019, that number was just 25.
At the same time there have been 6 exonerations from death row. National exonerations have fallen substantially from their recent peak, although the Registry credits much of the year-to-year variation to clusters of cases arising from particular episodes of misconduct, such as 99 in Cook County, Illinois alone. Death-sentence exonerations, meanwhile, are a small subset of all exonerations with only one nationwide in 2025.
Wrongful convictions exist, and any credible claim of innocence deserves serious examination. But clemency exists precisely to permit governors to examine individual cases, individual circumstances and individual injustices.
A blanket commutation asks a different question – whether hundreds of separate murder prosecutions, jury verdicts, death sentences and decades of judicial review should be overridden together because the system itself has been declared unjust.
That requires more than pointing to disparities.
California voters were given the choice. They chose to retain the death penalty.
The problem isn’t necessarily the data Chammah and Castellano report. It’s the data they leave out.
Steve Smith is a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute, focusing on California’s ongoing crime challenges.