California’s new governor signs moratorium on executions
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The 737 inmates on the nation’s largest death row got a reprieve from California Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday when he signed an executive order placing a moratorium on executions.
Newsom also withdrew the lethal injection regulations that death penalty opponents already have tied up in courts and moved to shutter the new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison that has never been used.
‘‘It’s a very emotional place that I stand,’’ Newsom told reporters after signing the order. ‘‘This is about who I am as a human being, this is about what I can or cannot do; to me this was the right thing to do.’’
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Newsom, a Democrat, called the death penalty ‘‘a failure’’ that ‘‘has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or can’t afford expensive legal representation.’’ He also said innocent people have been wrongly convicted and sometimes put to death.
He said his views on the death penalty were first shaped 40 years ago when he learned of his grandfather’s and father’s advocacy for a wrongfully convicted man.
‘‘I was a young man learning that life story,’’ he said after signing the order. ‘‘I’ve gotten a sense over a course of many, many years over the disparities in our criminal justice system.’’
President Trump tweeted Wednesday that voters don’t support Newsom’s decision.
‘‘Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!’’ Trump wrote.
California hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, when Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor. And though voters in 2016 narrowly approved a ballot measure to speed up the punishment, no condemned inmate faced imminent execution.
Since California’s last execution, its death row population has grown to house one of every four condemned inmates in the US. They include Scott Peterson, whose trial for killing his wife, Laci, riveted the country, and Richard Davis, who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas during a slumber party and strangled her.
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