Amnesty International has very positively assessed the decision announced this Thursday by California Governor Gavin Newsom to commute all current death sentences in the state. The measure affects 548 inmates who, instead of waiting for their execution, will move to serving life imprisonment behind bars.
The human rights organization recalls that Newsom had already ordered a moratorium on the death penalty in California, where no one has been executed in the last 20 years. However, that suspension was provisional in nature and required additional steps, such as those now adopted by the governor to solidify it.
The executive director of Amnesty for the United States, Nadia Daar, has hailed "a day that will be remembered in the history of California and will be discussed around the world for years" and has expressed her thanks to Newsom for acting on a request submitted jointly by Amnesty, Clemency California and more than 40 international organizations.
According to the head of the NGO, "Governor Newsom has announced a decisive and forceful step to put an end to the use of the death penalty, the ultimate example of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment". With this decision, they argue, the leader "laid the groundwork so that other people in California can get the state to move toward total abolition" of the death penalty in the territory, which until now was the state with the highest number of death row inmates in the country.
The governor’s order, Amnesty underlines, "turns that prolonged pause into a significant and lasting advance against an intrinsically cruel, discriminatory and irreversible system, incompatible with human rights".
Despite the scope of this step, the organization warns that, although it is a relevant milestone, "it is not the finish line" and there is still "room to move forward" so that the United States, which is part of the small group of 17 states that continue to carry out executions, "can leave the death penalty behind" definitively.