Gavin Newsom saved his worst for last, commuting the sentences of all 548 convicted murderers on Death Row to life in prison.

If these commutations survive legal challenge, they will mark an extreme and cynical abuse of power.

Start with the fact that California voters have decided, in one ballot initiative after another, to keep the death penalty. 

In 2016, voters rejected the abolition of the death penalty — and even approved Proposition 66, to cut down on endless appeals.

Newsom decided that he alone could override the democratic will of the people. So much for “No Kings,” and all of his complaints about President Donald Trump acting like a dictator.

Consider also that Newsom waited until he was a lame duck, after Election Day, on his way out of office. He did not have the political courage to make his decision while he was still accountable to the voters who elected him.

Next, note Newsom’s appalling narcissism. His letter explaining his decision is all about himself: “I could not remain true to my values … I have concluded the state cannot morally kill [murderers].” 

He even had the nerve to claim: “I follow the moral leadership of past presidents.”

Abraham Lincoln, perhaps our greatest president, granted clemency in many cases, but also approved the execution of deserters during the Civil War, a great moral cause. He understood the heavy burden of leadership did not allow private sentiment to interfere with public duty.

The duty of a governor includes, first and foremost, a duty to the victims of crime, as well as their families, whom Newsom never consulted. 

A governor also has a duty to the communities made less safe by leniency toward murder.

While claiming to embrace “California values,” Newsom claimed that he could not “distinguish among crimes and offenders,” and granted clemency even to the “worst of the worst.”

And so Newsom spared monsters who kidnapped, raped, and killed children. 

Newsom protected mass murderers like Randy Kraft, convicted of killing 16 people. 

Newsom also saved twisted predators Wayne Allen Ford, who killed four women and mutilated their bodies, and was found to be carrying a severed breast in his pocket when he was arrested.

The governor has decided that the lives of these demons are worth more than the lives of their victims. 

The killers will remain in prison for life — but they will be alive.

The moral questions around the death penalty are real, and serious. They are more urgent after the botched execution in Tennessee of convicted murderer Christa Pike, who kidnapped, tortured, and mutilated 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer before smashing her skull in 1995.

But capital punishment is as old as the Bible. 

The Book of Exodus — a story of freedom from slavery — also says that while there may be clemency for involuntary manslaughter, “if a man plots deliberately against his friend to slay him,” he should be put to death (21:14).

As philosopher Walter Berns argued, the reason we have a terrible punishment for murder is that the law must be feared, so that it can “remind us of the moral order by which alone we can live as human beings.”

There are people with principled objections to the death penalty. Newsom’s decision was premeditated, but it was not principled.

This was shocking political opportunism, aimed at impressing voters in the upcoming Democratic presidential primary.

With socialists rising within his party, Newsom is appealing to the far-left.

He may win the Democratic nomination. But good luck explaining to a general electorate why Newsom let mass murderers live — and defied the will of the people of California.

Joel Pollak is Opinion editor of the California Post.

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