Amherst professor says opposing capital punishment is no longer third rail
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced a universal clemency that, according to an opinion column by Austin Sarat published in The Guardian on November 6, will empty the state’s death row and remove hundreds of people from the threat of execution. Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, called the decision “a truly remarkable moment in the US’s death penalty history” and wrote that it “saves hundreds of lives” and “signals a national shift.” He reported that the clemency reaches convicted killers including Richard Allen Davis, Joseph Naso, and Cary Stayner.
Sarat argued the decision matters beyond California. Coming from a governor he described as “seemingly looking to run for the presidency,” it signals that America’s attachment to capital punishment is weakening and that opposing the death penalty is “no longer a third rail in US politics.” He called on governors in other death penalty states who oppose capital punishment to follow Newsom’s example rather than leave anyone on death row when they leave office.
Newsom announced the decision in a statement the column quotes at length. “The people sentenced to death in California caused indescribable suffering to victims, their families, communities, and our state as a whole … many Californians feel that those who commit brutal crimes deserve to die. But as governor, I have concluded that the state cannot morally kill them,” Newsom said. “Faithfulness to our values is measured by how we act when it is most difficult to uphold them. For me, this is one of those instances … Today, I’m acting on my long and deeply held conviction that individually and collectively we are stronger as a society when we reject state-sponsored killing.”
Newsom also answered the objection that some crimes are too grave for mercy. “Some have said I should not grant clemency to people who committed the worst of the worst crimes … I have learned, however, from speaking with the victims harmed by these crimes, that each experiences their loss as the worst of the worst,” he said, arguing that distinguishing among offenders “would inadvertently create two classes of murder victims, those whose perpetrators deserve the death penalty and the rest.” Sarat called the statement “an incredibly direct embrace of abolitionism, not just because the death penalty system is flawed, but because the death penalty is morally wrong.”
The breadth of the clemency is central to the column’s argument: it covers people Sarat said “certainly qualify as among the worst of the worst.” The column identifies Richard Allen Davis as the man who kidnapped and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993. A Newsweek account cited in the column says Davis took Klaas from her bedroom in Petaluma at knifepoint and strangled her to death; her disappearance sparked a nationwide search, Davis was arrested two months later, and he led police to her body in a shallow grave. According to that account, the case led California to pass its 1994 “three strikes” law setting longer sentences for repeat offenders.
The column also cites Newsweek on Joseph Naso, known as the “Alphabet Killer,” sentenced to death in 2013 after being convicted of the killings of four women with matching initials between 1977 and 1994, and Cary Stayner, the “Yosemite Park Killer,” sentenced to death after being convicted of the 1999 murders of four women near Yosemite National Park. “It takes extraordinary and exemplary courage to spare their lives,” Sarat wrote.
Sarat contrasted that completeness with the federal record. In December 2024, he wrote, President Joe Biden chose not to spare the lives of three of the 40 people who were on federal death row — a decision in which the president “seemed to concede that they deserved to be executed,” in Sarat’s characterization. “Newsom’s death penalty abolitionism is complete in a way that Biden’s was not,” Sarat argued, calling Newsom’s version “harder and more important.”
The clemency extends what Sarat called a record “unparalleled in the modern history of the death penalty.” In 2019, Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions in California. The American Bar Association praised that step, saying the choice to impose a moratorium “so early in his term was for him personally the culmination of a 40-year journey of thinking through the consequences and morality of the death penalty.” The ABA also noted that “at the same time Governor Newsom announced the moratorium, he also directed San Quentin State Prison to decommission its execution chamber.”
Sarat placed the announcement in political history as well, recalling 1988. When CNN anchor Bernard Shaw asked the Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis whether, if his wife were raped and murdered, he would favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer, Dukakis answered, “No, I don’t, Bernard … And I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life.” A Politico account cited in the column said Dukakis “had been on the record for years and years on that subject” and “didn’t believe it deterred crime,” and recorded the press-room reaction: “He’s through.” “That’s all she wrote.” “Get the hook!” Even with that lesson looming, Sarat wrote, Newsom’s universal clemency “was not hedged or spun in any way.”
Sarat wrote that the announcement lands on a national backdrop that includes Christa Pike’s failed execution and three executions carried out in one day on November 5. Even so, “the readiness to end the death penalty is there,” he argued, and “the governor knows that Americans are ready to move on and put the death penalty in the rearview mirror.” He named Ohio’s Mike DeWine among the governors who oppose the death penalty and should not “leave anyone behind on death row when they leave office.”
Stanford Law School’s Michael Romano, quoted in the column, said a Newsom universal clemency would be a “cataclysmic decision for the death penalty,” and Sarat relayed Romano’s judgment that the action is “most important declaration that has been made in modern American history, that executions are intolerable under any circumstances.” The column ends on a categorical claim: “Newsom has changed America for the better,” Sarat wrote, adding that the stakes are higher because, in his view, the present occupant of the White House does not share that readiness. Sarat is the author of “Life After Death: Surviving Execution.”