Last year, California imposed more death sentences than any state other than Florida, Texas, and Alabama. While the numbers of sentences were not large by historical standards, that’s truly unusual company for the Golden State.
Indeed, when Americans think about the death penalty, they almost invariably think first of Texas, not California. For decades, the Lone Star State was the death penalty capital of the United States.
And there was good reason for why it earned that label. Since 1982, Texas has executed 591 people, far more than any other state. Indeed, in that period, a single Texas county, Harris County, “was responsible for more executions than any state except Texas.”
Looking back to the end of the twentieth century, Texas led the way in death sentences and executions. In 1999, 48 people were sentenced to death in Texas, more than any other state, and it housed 458 people on its death row.
That same year, it carried out 35 executions, again leading the nation. As Ned Walpin noted at the time, “Texas executes…people…at a pace that has no parallel in the modern era of the death penalty in the U.S.” He called Texas “ground zero for capital punishment.”
Twenty-five years later, the death penalty seems to have beaten a hasty retreat at “ground zero.” In 2024, Texas carried out only four executions and handed out just six new death sentences.
Today, there are 176 people are on the state’s death row. Four executions are scheduled in Texas for 2025.
Meanwhile, as the death penalty withers in Texas, it remains very much alive in California. At the end of the day, it may be as hard for abolitionists to end capital punishment there as it will be in Texas.
In 2024, California had 632 inmates with death sentences. That is more than three times the Texas number. And, again, since 1999, the size of the death row population in Texas has declined dramatically. In contrast, California’s has grown.
Lest we think 2024 is a one-year blip, in 2023, juries in seven states handed down a total of twenty-one death sentences. California was again one of them, joining Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Texas. The year before, California was one of eleven other states with new death sentences.
Of course, the situation of capital punishment in California is more complicated than these figures suggest.
It has not executed anyone since 2006, when it put 76-year-old Clarence Allen to death by lethal injection, though before that, the state was among the leaders in putting people to death. A local Fox News station noted, “From 1893 to 2006, the state of California executed 513 prisoners by use of hanging, lethal gas and lethal injection.”
Executions stopped in California because of a federal court order entered after Allen was killed and because, in 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium. He called the death penalty a “failure” that discriminated against people of color, had “no public safety value,” and “wasted billions of taxpayer dollars.”
That view was reflected in the report of a panel set up in 2021 by the California Legislature to study the state’s death penalty. That panel called for outright abolition.
“Recent efforts,” it said, “to improve, simplify, and expedite California’s system of capital punishment have failed to accomplish their stated goals and may have made things even worse.”
In 2022, Governor Newsom ordered the state to begin to dismantle its death row. But Newsom has not made abolishing the death penalty a top priority
That may be because California voters have not been eager to end the death penalty altogether. In 2016 and again in 2020, they defeated ballot measures that would have done just that.
As the New York Times puts it, “The state runs progressive on every issue, but on the death penalty, public opinion has been stubbornly right-leaning.”
And, even if Newsom wanted to commute the sentences of everyone who has one, it would not be easy in California since many of those on death row also have other felony convictions. Under state law, the California Supreme Court would need to review each commutation.
So, at least for now, the battle against the death penalty in California will have to be conducted out of the limelight county by county, one case at a time. As is often the case in death penalty states, there are vast disparities in the receptivity to capital punishment from one place to another in the Golden State.
The largest number, 178 of the state’s death sentences, have come from Los Angeles County. Another 86 came from Riverside County, making it the leader among California’s most populous counties in death sentences per capita.
At the county level, elected prosecutors are the key death penalty decision-makers. Not surprisingly, they have very different opinions about what they should do about the death penalty.
Some lead the way in trying to end capital punishment in their counties. Soon after he took office, former Los Angeles County Prosecutor George Gascon issued “a series of sweeping changes that ended new death penalty prosecutions and moved toward reconsidering existing death sentences in the county with the nation’s largest death row.”
Not only did he say that he would not seek new death sentences, but he promised not to seek an execution date for any person under a sentence of death. That is part of the reason he was soundly defeated by an opponent who promised to resume seeking death sentences and execution dates.
Like Gascon, Santa Clara County District Attorney Mark Rosen wants to end the death penalty in his jurisdiction. Moreover, he is seeking to undo every death sentence that originated in Santa Clara County.
According to the Sacramento Bee, his next attempt will be in March. It will be “the latest in more than a dozen cases he had successfully brought over the past few months.”
But other prosecutors in California seemed very reluctant to follow Gascon or Rosen.
Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho continues “to seek capital punishment in some cases. He says that the decision to seek a death sentence is never taken lightly. Once imposed, the death sentences are then automatically appealed. Any decision to alter from this path would require compelling circumstances.”
Jeff Reisig, district attorney in neighboring Yolo County, takes a different view. He says he will never do what Rosen is trying to do. “The voters have been pretty unequivocal,” he notes, “in refusing to eliminate capital punishment.”
The district attorneys in Riverside and San Bernadino Counties, where all of California’s 2024 death sentences were handed down, take a similar position. Both have been active at the state level to preserve capital punishment.
Convincing people like them to join the abolition bandwagon will not be easy. Indeed, it may not even be possible.
That is why the New York Times rightly says that California is in “death penalty limbo.” As a result, it is likely to continue being one of the few states in the country that, year after year, keeps piling on death sentences.
2024 showed that until abolitionists figure out strategies that can achieve the same kind of success in California that they have achieved in Texas, the United States will not be able to finally rid itself of the death penalty.