Gavin Newsom wiped out 548 jury verdicts with one signature, and prosecutors are lining up to haul him into court.
His office swears every one of those condemned men will die behind bars anyway.
And Adam Carolla saw exactly where this road ends.
The Man Show Guy Turned Into the Adult in the Room
Adam Carolla grew up in North Hollywood, co-hosted The Man Show alongside a young Jimmy Kimmel, and somehow became one of the sharpest critics of the state that made him famous.
So Carolla didn’t need a briefing when Sean Hannity brought him on to talk about Newsom sparing every inmate on California’s death row. Fox News ran the segment under his warning that California should be a “cautionary tale.”
He’s right. But the cautionary part isn’t the big number Newsom wants in the history books.
It’s what happens after the cameras leave.
Newsom Picked the Killers Over the Families
The term-limited Governor announced he will commute all 548 death sentences in the state to life without parole. In his clemency announcement, Newsom claimed capital punishment is “incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us.”
He can’t finish the job alone. According to the Associated Press, 382 of those cases still need approval from at least four state Supreme Court justices.
At least a dozen district attorneys didn’t wait for the paperwork to clear before they went to war.
Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer called the move “mercy for the wolves” that inflicts “the ultimate act of cruelty on the sheep.” San Joaquin District Attorney Ron Freitas called it “a slap in the face to victims and their families.”
San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson went straight at the Governor’s motives. “The Governor is attempting to appear courageous with this decision. He is not courageous. His commutations are solely based upon power and political aspirations,” Anderson said.
Anderson pointed to Kevin Cooper, whom a jury condemned for murdering Josh Ryen’s parents and sister along with Ryen’s friend, Chris Hughes. According to Anderson, Ryen survived the attack, and Newsom never picked up the phone to ask Ryen or Hughes’ mother what they thought. “Courage would require the Governor to follow Marsy’s Law, California’s constitutional rights belonging to victims of crime,” Anderson said. “He has not.”
Newsom’s office insists none of the 548 will ever walk out. The affected prisoners will remain in prison, the office says, and they aren’t eligible for release.
But Spitzer spotted the trapdoor.
Life Without Parole Already Comes With a Countdown Clock
On October 1, new regulations from California’s Board of Parole Hearings took effect. Spitzer warned that those rules put inmates serving life without parole “one step closer” to the exit.
The regulations create a process for inmates who have served at least 25 years to seek a sentence recall through the courts or ask the Governor for a commutation. The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation estimates more than 2,400 inmates could qualify, including Scott Peterson, whom a jury convicted in 2004 of murdering his pregnant wife Laci and their unborn son Conner.
The board claims the rules don’t authorize anybody’s release. Its officials say the process only prepares risk assessments for judges and governors weighing those requests.
And that’s technically true, the same way a staircase doesn’t technically put anyone on the roof.
Ask the Menendez brothers how permanent “life without parole” turned out to be. Lyle and Erik Menendez murdered their parents in 1989, and a Los Angeles judge resentenced them in May 2025 to terms that made both men eligible for parole.
Maybe that’s an unfair comparison. The Menendez case followed a different legal path, and nobody in Sacramento has opened the cell doors for Peterson.
But families don’t measure risk by legal paths. They measure it by sleepless nights.
Melissa Huckaby, a former Sunday school teacher, is serving life without parole for the 2009 kidnapping and murder of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu. Sandra’s aunt, Angie Chavez, joined other families outside the parole board’s headquarters when the foundation filed its lawsuit in July. “Keep your promise. Let life without the possibility of parole mean exactly what it says,” Chavez pleaded.
Kim Juarez, a close friend of Laci Peterson, described what the rule change did to her. “Anxiety begins all over again. The sleepless nights return. The fear returns,” Juarez said.
Now stack Newsom’s commutations on top of that system. Every one of those 548 men just traded a death sentence for a sentence that Sacramento already built a review process to revisit.
That’s the second act Newsom left out of his press release.
Democrats Are Already Shipping the Sacramento Model East
Carolla called California a cautionary tale for a reason. Bad ideas in Sacramento rarely stay there.
Democrat lawmakers in New York are pushing a package of parole bills that includes a California-style elder parole program. Under one proposal, any inmate over 55 who has served at least 15 years would get a parole hearing, no matter the crime.
The Suffolk County District Attorney’s office warned the measure would effectively abolish life without parole, “even for Serial Killers, Cop Killers, and Racist Mass Murderers.” Critics have pointed to Payton Gendron, the Buffalo Tops supermarket gunman serving life without parole for murdering 10 people, as the kind of inmate who could someday benefit.
So the pattern looks something like this. First, Democrats freeze executions and call it mercy. Then they empty death row and promise the killers will die in prison. Then a parole board nobody elected quietly writes the rules that make “die in prison” negotiable.
And every step comes wrapped in the same language about values and dignity, never about the 8-year-old girl in Tracy or the family in Modesto that spent Christmas Eve 2002 searching for Laci.
Newsom has his eye on the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination, and he knows the left-wing base will cheer this as moral courage. The Democrats who just grabbed new statehouses in the midterms are watching how the cheering sounds.
Anderson had a different word for it. “Courage would require speaking with crime victims and the surviving family members of the people murdered by these death row inmates,” he said.
Kern County District Attorney Cynthia Zimmer promised a fight. “This assault on justice will be challenged,” Zimmer said.
But the Cantu family already learned the hardest lesson in this whole mess. They skipped a trial years ago because the state told them life without parole meant forever.
“If we had known that this was a possibility for her to get out and have freedom, we would have sought the death penalty,” Chavez said.
Sources: Fox News, “California should be a ‘cautionary tale’: Adam Carolla” (Hannity); Fox News, “Newsom’s death-row commutations spark DA revolt as prosecutors warn of legal fight”; Fox News, “Gavin Newsom wipes out California’s death row in historic mass commutation”; Fox News, “California sued over policy that could free serial killers as Laci Peterson’s friend sounds alarm”; Fox News, “New York bills could abolish life without parole for serial killers and cop killers, critics warn”; CBS News Sacramento, “Crime victims, prosecutors sue over California regulations affecting inmates serving life without parole”; The Signal (Santa Clarita), “Newsom seeks to clear death row, commutes hundreds of sentences”; Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, “Trio of Bills Summary”; WRGA, “Menendez brothers granted 2027 parole hearing a year earlier than expected”