After nearly twenty years without an execution, the more pressing question is whether the state is willing to decide what should happen to the 573 – and increasing – number of inmates already sentenced to death. Executions have stopped while death sentences continue to be imposed, and politicians of both parties have largely avoided confronting the contradiction.
The San Francisco Chronicle suggests the issue could emerge in this year’s gubernatorial election. Republican candidate Steve Hilton has expressed support for ending Governor Gavin Newsom’s execution moratorium, while Democrat Xavier Becerra opposes capital punishment and supports maintaining it.
But both positions raise obvious questions.
If Hilton supports the death penalty, does he intend to resume executions? If Becerra opposes it, does he support commuting existing death sentences? Or does he simply favor maintaining a system in which death sentences remain legally valid but are never conducted?
After nearly twenty years without an execution, California’s death penalty system has become something neither supporters nor opponents originally envisioned. Capital punishment remains legal and juries continue to impose death sentences.
As of May 2026, 573 inmates remain under sentence of death, the largest condemned population in the United States. Seventy-five have exhausted their appeals after decades of judicial review.
Since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978, California has sentenced 769 individuals to death. Thirteen have been executed, six have been exonerated, and nearly 200 have died while awaiting execution.
Wrongful convictions remain a legitimate concern.
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 6 California death-row inmates have been exonerated since 1989. Those cases matter because capital punishment is irreversible.
But in 2026, the larger issue facing California is no longer innocence. It is indecision.
In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions and ordered the dismantling of the execution chamber at San Quentin. Yet Newsom neither abolished the death penalty nor commuted existing death sentences. Instead, he froze the system in place.
The uncertainty extends beyond the courtroom. Newsom ordered the dismantling traditional death row housing and dispersed condemned inmates throughout the prison system.
California voters have repeatedly declined opportunities to abolish capital punishment, rejecting Proposition 34 in 2012 and Proposition 62 in 2016. In the same election, voters approved Proposition 66, which sought to accelerate appeals. Californians have consistently expressed support for retaining the death penalty, even as state leaders increasingly function as though it no longer exists.
As a result, California finds itself trapped between two competing impulses. Voters reject efforts to end the death penalty and juries continue to authorize death sentences while its Governors are refusing to carry them out.
That leaves four possible paths forward: resume executions, continue the moratorium indefinitely, commute existing death sentences to life without parole, or abolish capital punishment entirely.
Each option carries legal, fiscal, political, and moral consequences.
What appears increasingly difficult to justify is the status quo. Even well-worn medical-judicial arguments regarding execution procedures seem moot in light of the End of Life Option Act which has allowed physicians write 1,281 fatal prescriptions as of 2023.
For many victims’ families, a death sentence was intended to provide finality. Instead, many cases have remained unresolved for decades as administrations, policies, and political priorities changed.
California’s death penalty system today bears little resemblance to the one voters approved in 1978. The gap between legal authority and actual practice has become impossible to ignore.
The issue facing voters is no longer whether they support capital punishment in theory, but whether California intends to decide what role, if any, capital punishment will play in practice.
The next governor will eventually face a choice: resume executions, formally end them, commute existing death sentences, or continue maintaining a death penalty that exists largely on paper.
After nearly twenty years without an execution, the real question is no longer whether California has a death penalty. It is whether California is willing to decide what should happen to the hundreds of inmates already sentenced to it.
Steve Smith is a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute, focusing on California’s ongoing crime challenges.
