Sacramento Police Officer Tara O'Sullivan was shot dead answering a domestic violence call in 2019.
Gavin Newsom just erased her killer's death sentence on his way out of the governor's office.
Her mother found out exactly how you're about to.
Newsom Never Called the Families Before Erasing 548 Death Sentences
Kelley O'Sullivan believed her daughter's killer would die behind bars at San Quentin after a single appeal.
Instead, Governor Gavin Newsom commuted the death sentence of Adel Ramos, the man a jury convicted of murdering Officer O'Sullivan, down to life without parole.
Ramos is one of 548 California killers whose death sentences Newsom wiped out with a single open letter on November 5.
At least 29 of those inmates were sentenced to die for murdering a combined 32 police officers across the state.
One of them is Tao Rivera, who gunned down Merced Officer Stephan Gray during a traffic stop in 2004.
Nearly two dozen family members gathered in Sacramento Thursday to say the same thing.
Several of them say they found out from news reports, not from a phone call out of the governor's office.
Newsom reached every death row inmate in the state except the three federal killers most Americans could actually name.
Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, and Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers stayed on death row.
They belong to the federal government, not California, so Newsom's pen couldn't reach them.
Everyone else got the same stroke of that pen.
San Luis Obispo County District Attorney Dan Dow did not mince words.
"Juries chose justice case by case, voters chose it five times," he said.
Greg Totten, who leads the California District Attorneys Association, called it something sharper than politics.
Newsom, he said, "turned an extraordinary constitutional safeguard into a sweeping instrument of personal policy."
The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, led by former Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, says it will take Newsom to court over it.
Schubert argues that one governor's signature cannot undo what twelve jurors decided, one verdict at a time.
He Waited Until the Votes Were Already Counted
Newsom announced the commutations on November 5.
That's two days after Election Day.
His chosen successor, Xavier Becerra, had already won the governor's race.
Becerra had already promised to keep the execution moratorium frozen regardless.
Newsom has spent the past year positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run.
An election-week decision is not an accident for a man who reads polls for a living.
He let the families of 548 murder victims learn his position on their killers only after the ballots were locked in.
Kelley O'Sullivan does not call that courage.
"Because Tara can't speak, but I can, and I will every time," she said.
Jerry Brown Never Did This in Eight Years as Governor
The comparison nobody in Sacramento wants to make is the one that matters most.
Jerry Brown had eight years as governor and never commuted a single death sentence.
George Ryan, the Illinois Republican who commuted 167 death sentences in 2003, did it after his state had already produced 13 death row exonerations.
Illinois had a documented innocence crisis.
California has no comparable crisis.
What California has is a governor eyeing the White House and a primary calendar that rewards him for emptying death row the moment the votes stopped counting.
Sacramento's Officer O'Sullivan and Merced's Officer Gray were murdered by men a jury sentenced to die after two separate trials, one for guilt and one for punishment.
Newsom reversed both verdicts in that same decision.
If Xavier Becerra wants to keep the moratorium Newsom started, he can explain that choice to the families now lining up to sue over it.
Newsom will not be the one answering those questions.
He will be in Iowa.
Sources:
- Lee Anne Denyer, "Families of Victims Denounce California Governor's Plan to Commute Death Sentences," KCRA, November 12, 2026.
- Breitbart News, "Newsom Moves to Commute All 548 California Death Sentences to Life," Breitbart, November 5, 2026.
- Washington Free Beacon, "Newsom Spared Every California Death Row Inmate in Symbolic Move Ahead of Expected 2028 Presidential Run," Washington Free Beacon, November 2026.
- Louis Casiano, "Gavin Newsom Wipes Out California's Death Row in Historic Mass Commutation," Fox News, November 5, 2026.
- Lowell Cauffiel, "Gavin Newsom's Mass Commutation of Death Row Inmates Faces Legal Battle, Pushback from Prosecutors," Breitbart, November 6, 2026.
- Police1, "29 Calif. Death Row Inmates Tied to Killings of 32 Officers Included in Newsom's Commutation Plan," Police1, November 2026.
