SACRAMENTO, Calif. — When the Reverend Dr. Jeff Hood learned Gov. Gavin Newsom was considering sparing the lives of the nearly 600 people on California’s death row, he thought back to 2004, when the then-mayor of San Francisco defied members of his own party to grant same-sex couples marriage licenses a decade before gay marriage became legal.

“I remember how proud I was when he did that, in that really gutsy way, and said, ‘Hey, this is the direction that I think it’s important to lead, not just (in) San Francisco, but the nation,’” Hood said in an interview. “And I think that’s where we’re at now.”

Newsom is considering sparing 563 death row prisoners’ lives by commuting their sentences to life without parole. It could be one of his final acts in office, as he is termed out of office early next year and is reportedly considering a run for president in 2028.

Hood, a father of five who lives in Arkansas, is an Old Catholic priest, referring to a sect that broke with the Roman Catholic Church in the 1800s but still adheres to Catholic dogma. He is the founder of the Execution Intervention Project, through which he acts as a spiritual adviser to men serving death row sentences in U.S. prisons. Since 2023, he has witnessed 14 executions.

Earlier this week, Hood wrote to Newsom, encouraging him to follow through with mass commutation, citing the current moratorium on executions, which Newsom put in place in 2019, and his remaking of the state’s most notorious prison into a pinnacle of reform.

“You have done what no California governor before you dared to do. You shut the execution chamber at San Quentin and refused to let the state kill on your watch,” Hood wrote in his letter, which was exclusively obtained by The Sacramento Bee. “You looked at the largest death row in the country and said no. Few have said no to a death chamber. You did. But a moratorium ends the day you leave office. The law that consecrates the horror remains. Whoever comes next may not share your restraint.”

California law allows the governor to grant clemency to prisoners with a single felony conviction, but must receive approval from the state Supreme Court to pardon or commute a prisoner with multiple felony convictions.

California voters previously blocked two attempts to abolish the death penalty in 2012 and 2016, though public support has been on the decline. The practice has received more scrutiny in recent weeks, after Tennessee prisoner Christa Pike, 50, survived a botched execution for her role in the 1995 torture and murder of a classmate, Colleen Slemmer.

On Friday, Pike said she was in “constant pain” in her first remarks since she survived being injected with a lethal drug and woke up in the hospital. Authorities sentenced Pike to death after she was convicted of luring Slemmer to her death with two others then beating and slashing her with a box cutter.

“I still am horrified by Christa Pike’s crimes,” Hood said. “I mean, man, damn, 18-year-old woman, you know, carving a pentagram on her chest, and I mean, just horrible, horrible, horrible.”

Slemmer’s family has rejected Pike’s statements of contrition and supported her execution. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, said she was “failed” by the state of Tennessee after Pike survived.

Xavier Becerra, Newsom’s likely successor, said he would maintain the state execution moratorium. State lawmakers have been more muted, though Assemblymember Nick Schultz, a Burbank Democrat who chairs his chamber’s public safety committee, said he supported the governor and urged him to “cement his legacy” by acting before he leaves office in early January.

The California District Attorneys Association said it “strongly opposed” mass commutation.

“Every death sentence in California represents an individual case in which a jury heard the evidence, considered the circumstances and determined that the most serious punishment under our law was warranted,” said association President Jeannine Pacioni. “These decisions were not made lightly, and many have been reviewed by courts for decades. To simply erase all those judgments with the stroke of a pen, without considering the facts of each case or the families affected, would be a profound disservice to the administration of justice.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration overturned a 2021 Biden executive order last year to allow federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty, and reinstated death by firing squad as a punishment. Nidal Hassan, a former Army psychiatrist, will be executed via firing squad on Dec. 3 after he killed 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.

“Governor Newsom, whether he realizes it or not, this is a real moment that doesn’t just touch Californians; it touches the rest of the country,” Hood said. “This is one of those issues that you can’t be halfway on. This is not a political moment. This is a moral moment. I’m not asking for Governor Newsom to be a politician. I’m asking him to be human, and I think that’s the epicenter of this.”

Hood cited his experience attending his advisees’ executions, of which he has attended 14 since 2023. The most recent was Anthony Boyd, whom Alabama prison officials executed last year via nitrogen gas for killing another man, Gregory Huguley, over a $200 drug debt.

After exhausting legal appeals up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against him hours before his execution, Boyd died on Oct. 23, 2025. Boyd, who maintained his innocence to the end, thrashed and convulsed for 40 minutes after prison officials attached a gas mask to his face, according to Hood and journalist Lee Hedgepeth, who witnessed Boyd’s execution.

“Until you know what it feels like to stand in that chamber and have somebody ask you for help, and you have to watch them die, they don’t understand the cost of the death penalty,” Hood said. “So when Californians engage in this conversation and say, ‘Well, this is you know eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. This is what we should do as a society.’ When you hear people talk like that, they don’t know the reality of this, and they don’t know a victim’s family.”

Despite voters upholding the practice, California has not executed anyone since 2006. The state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation does not currently have lethal injection drugs on hand, according to spokesperson Terri Hardy.

“I think a lot about victims’ families and just the torture that that California has put victims’ families through. You tell people, ‘We’re going to pursue a death sentence, and we’re going to get vengeance for you,’” Hood said, addressing prosecutors in favor of maintaining the death penalty. “Do we want to be a society that says, ‘We’re going to kill everybody who kills?’”

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