Donald Trump has attacked Gavin Newsom’s decision to commute the death sentences of 548 California inmates, calling it a “disaster for justice in America”.
Newsom, in one of his final acts as governor, announced on November 5 that every prisoner on California’s death row would be spared execution.
Trump condemned the move as a decision to halt the death penalty for “some of the worst cold blooded murderers to have ever lived”. He said relatives of those killed had been “rightfully” devastated by the decision.
Newsom acknowledged the “indescribable suffering” caused by the prisoners, but said the state could not morally execute them.
In a letter to California residents, he wrote: “State-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system and diminishes each of us.”
He added: “I know we cannot execute people in our imperfect legal system and remain true to our core values, first among them justice and human decency.”
Newsom said the murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas had helped persuade him to commute the sentences. Klaas was kidnapped in Petaluma, north of San Francisco, and murdered in 1993.
Her killer, Richard Allen Davis, was captured and sentenced to death. Newsom said he had met Klaas’s two sisters in October and that they had argued execution would not bring her back, heal their family or restore a sense of justice.
He described the meeting as one of the most profound of his life and said it had been crucial to his decision.
Polly Klaas’s father, Marc, opposed the commutations. He accused Newsom of freeing killers who were “absolutely the worst, most disgusting people that have ever lived”.
Michael and Cynthia Ellerin, whose daughter Ashley was killed by a man in 2001, said the governor’s decision was a “slap in the face” to their family and to relatives of murder victims across California.
“I could tell you if it was his daughter, he would change his tune,” Cynthia Ellerin said.
California has the largest death row in the United States, although the state has carried out only one execution in the past two decades.
The legal implementation of the commutations is also being contested. Under the state constitution, the governor can grant clemency alone to inmates convicted of a single felony.
However, approval from the California Supreme Court is required for anyone convicted of more than one felony. Newsom’s office said that means the court would have to approve 382 of the commutations.
