Xavier Becerra is pledging to extend California’s execution moratorium if elected governor.
The Democratic candidate, 67, seized on Tennessee’s botched lethal injection of Christa Pike last Wednesday to sharpen his death penalty stance for the California Post. His campaign pointed to a May tweet where he had already praised Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2019 moratorium, which halted executions in a state that has not carried one out since 2006 despite housing the nation’s largest death row at 564 inmates.
“Governor Newsom’s death penalty moratorium represented an important step toward a more just criminal justice system,” Becerra said.
“As Governor, I will extend California’s moratorium on executions and continue moving our state away from a costly, flawed system that disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities and too often gets it wrong.”
Pike, 49, was rushed to a hospital after Tennessee Department of Corrections staff administered two doses of Pentobarbital, the highly potent sedative used in lethal injections, but failed to kill her. Her lawyer said on Thursday afternoon that she remained unconscious.
“Christa is critically ill but not in a coma as I understand it,” the attorney said, adding she was still unconscious as of Thursday afternoon.
Pike received a death sentence for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, whom she beat, slashed and bludgeoned to death in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Newsom’s office reinforced its own position after the Pike incident in an email to The Post. The governor had criticized capital punishment as discriminatory and wasteful when signing his executive order six years ago.
“Governor Newsom has been clear about his position on the death penalty since his first year in office, when he ordered a moratorium on executions,” his office said.
Becerra’s Republican opponent Steve Hilton, 55, broke with his party’s traditional support for capital punishment to reveal his own personal opposition. Still, Hilton told the Los Angeles Times he would not extend the moratorium, citing direct voter input on the issue.
“I don’t think it’s OK for a governor to just substitute their personal opinion on an issue where the voters had an explicit and direct say,” Hilton said.
California voters rejected Proposition 62, which would have abolished the death penalty, in November 2016. They instead approved Proposition 66, designed to accelerate executions. The conflict between ballot results and executive policy has shadowed every gubernatorial discussion of capital punishment since.
The condemned population Becerra would inherit includes serial killer Charles Ng, convicted of eleven first-degree murders, and formerly Scott Peterson, who was convicted in 2004 of murdering his wife Laci Peterson when she was eight months pregnant. Peterson had his death sentence overturned in 2020 and was resentenced to life without parole.
More than 200 people have received death sentences in California since the state’s last execution in 2006, according to CalMatters, even as the moratorium rendered those sentences symbolic. Prosecutors retain the power to seek death, and juries continue to impose it, creating a growing population of condemned inmates in permanent legal limbo.
Becerra’s announcement places the moratorium at the center of the governor’s race, framing it as a criminal justice reform rather than a simple punishment debate. His language emphasizing racial disparities and systemic error echoes progressive prosecutors nationwide who have moved away from capital charges.
Hilton’s position attempts to thread a narrower needle: opposing death personally while deferring to what he characterizes as the electorate’s expressed will. The stance risks alienating both conservative supporters of execution and liberal opponents who want explicit abolition.
The Pike case offered both campaigns a vivid example of capital punishment’s practical failures. Tennessee’s Department of Corrections has not publicly explained how two full doses of Pentobarbital failed to cause death, or what medical interventions followed.
Becerra faces voters in the 2026 gubernatorial primary.