LIFERS: California’s outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is expected to run for president,  commuted the death sentences of the state’s 548 condemned prisoners, about a quarter of all death row inmates in the country in the largest mass commutation in history.

  Saying he finds the death penalty morally objectionable, Newsom reduced every death sentence to life without parole. “State-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system and diminishes each of us,” Newsom wrote in an open letter to California residents. “I know we cannot execute people in our...

  The death penalty usually takes decades to apply. The last prisoner executed in California committed murder in 1980 and was not executed until 2006 at age 76.