I’m 1 of More Than 600 People on CA’s Death Row. Newsom Must End Death Penalty.

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The Road to Abolition

I was arrested on Easter Sunday in 1999 while driving through the small town of Lemoore, California. I was held in a local county jail for seven years while fighting my case. In 2006, l was convicted of murders I did not commit, then was promptly hauled off to San Quentin’s notorious death row. Though I have never been a stranger to societal injustices, there’s something about being Black and having 12 non-Black jurors come back with a racially tinged verdict of “GUILTY” that just does something to you. At that moment, my fight to abolish the death penalty began.

My 25-year fight has encompassed publishing stories about capital punishment, sharing my story with the public and working toward my own freedom. After repeated bouts of disappointment and defeat, I sat and I sulked. I wondered if the death penalty’s inequitable pendulum would ever swing back toward the arc of abolition.

As we ended 2024, I felt a shift. On December 23, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life without a possibility of parole. On December 31, North Carolina’s governor at the time, Roy Cooper, commuted the death sentences of 15 of the 136 people facing execution in his state.

But I’ve come to understand that criminal legal system reforms can shift as easily as wind. President Donald Trump has already signed a sweeping execution order that directs the attorney general to “take all necessary and lawful action” to ensure that states have enough lethal injection drugs to carry out executions.

This month, President Trump’s newly installed attorney general, Pamela Bondi, released memos to the Justice Department to lift the moratorium on federal executions, instruct federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in certain cases, and assist local prosecutors in pursuing death sentences under state law against the 37 individuals who received commutations under Biden. Bondi then ordered the transfer of a federal prisoner to Oklahoma to be executed.

In this uncertain time, when political opinions on the death penalty are split, my hope is that my home state of California — which has the largest death row population in the United States — can show the rest of the country what is possible by fully abolishing its death penalty.

There’s been some progress. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a moratorium on executions in the state. It was the most hopeful I had been since the guilty verdict had been handed down in my wrongful conviction. It felt like public support, political will and the pulse of the nation were finally aligning toward a long overdue reckoning.

I was so caught up in the belief that justice was on the horizon that I went out on a limb and predicted that the death penalty was on the verge of extinction. But that was far from the truth. In California, confusing law changes and public misinformation have muddied progress.

Last year, for example, I moved to a new prison as the state phased out San Quentin’s death row. It was the result of Proposition 66, which passed in 2016 and allowed for death row prisoners to be relocated across the state. Many Californians mistook the dismantling of death row as the end of the death penalty — but Prop 66 actually streamlines and guts the appellate process with the aim of speeding up executions.

While I’m no longer at San Quentin, my death sentence is alive and well. More than 600 people incarcerated in California prisons are still at risk of execution.

I have witnessed some small slivers of hope. In April 2024, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen moved to change the sentences of more than a dozen prisoners from death into life behind bars with no chance of parole. Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price also announced that her office was ordered by a federal judge to review 35 death penalty convictions, following the disclosure of prosecutorial misconduct in jury selection. Some cases have moved toward commutations or reduced sentences, according to a November article in The New Yorker.

But we cannot rely on small measures to tackle this massive injustice. Those two examples, as well as the commutations granted by President Biden and North Carolina’s former governor, amount to less than 100 people spared state-sponsored execution. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, around 2,250 prisoners currently face execution in the United States.

Twenty-three states have abolished the death penalty. It would be a momentous achievement if Governor Newsom, a leader in the Democratic Party with potential presidential aspirations, made California next.

I’ll continue to find reasons to hope, like I’ve done for the past 25 years. Last year, a consortium of nationally renowned civil rights organizations, legal organizations and a law firm filed a first-of-its-kind extraordinary writ petition in the Supreme Court of California, challenging the state’s death penalty statute as racially discriminatory and unconstitutional under the equal protection guarantees of the California constitution.

“We urge the Court to address this longstanding injustice and ensure that Black and Brown people are no longer sentenced disproportionately to death,” Lisa Romo, a senior deputy state public defender, said at the time.

I am living that longstanding injustice. My hope is that Newsom will go beyond the moratorium he ordered in 2019, and stand on the same set of unwavering principles as other Democratic leaders who have had the courage to end the death penalty.