California clears death row

The California governor announced the move on Thursday in an open letter in which he called state-sanctioned killing “incompatible” with the state’s values and morally wrong – though the state hasn’t executed anyone in two decades. Until the move, California’s death row population was the largest in the Western Hemisphere and represented more than a quarter of the death row prisoners in the entire US. The commutation also ranks among the largest of its kind in modern world history, though it falls well short of Kenya, which commuted 4,000 death sentences in 2009.