In renewing our call to California Governor Gavin Newsom to provide clemency to the 568 persons currently on California’s death row, we wanted to share scenes from the June 30th Universal Clemency Rally in Sacramento.

“Today, collectively, we’re here asking that Governor Newsom do what he knows is right, which is commute the sentence of all the individuals who are on death row in the state of California.” – Ricardo D. García, Los Angeles County Public Defender

“California’s death penalty isn’t just broken, it’s indefensible. It’s applied arbitrarily and creates a two-tiered system of justice. The county where the crime took place, the race of the defendant and the victim, and a defendant’s income, are the biggest predictors of who gets sentenced to death. California has sentenced innocent people to death. That’s not hypothetical. That’s a fact. And executing an innocent person is not a risk we should ever be willing to take.” – Abdi Soltani, Executive Director, ACLU of Northern California

“If I had one opportunity to say something to the governor about commuting the death sentences is that you have support in doing that, governor. You saw the people who were here in the program just recently. All of those people, all of the organizations that they represent, all of the people that those organizations represent, and a giant, silent majority of people who understand that we can work at being just, and we can do our best, but we’re always going to make mistakes. Any human system is going to be fallible, and the kind of mistake we’re talking about with the death penalty is irreversible.” – Reverend Regina Banks, Director, California Lutheran Office of Public Policy