How often does the California Supreme Court or Board of Parole Hearings review Newsom's clemency decisions involving multiple felonies?
Executive summary
California law requires that any clemency—pardon or commutation—granted to a person with two or more felony convictions first receive recommendations from the Board of Parole Hearings and the concurrence of the California Supreme Court [1] [2]. In practice under Governor Gavin Newsom, those institutional checkpoints have been invoked routinely: Newsom’s office sends such cases to the Board, and the Supreme Court has frequently been asked to review and has overwhelmingly concurred in his requests, though public counts in reporting vary and full transparency about sealed filings remains limited [1] [3] [4] [5].
1. Legal trigger: when a second felony forces two reviewers
The constitutional trigger is straightforward: if an applicant has been convicted of two or more felonies, the governor cannot act alone and must obtain the Board of Parole Hearings’ recommendation and the California Supreme Court’s approval before issuing a pardon or commutation [1] [2]. If the applicant has no more than one felony, the governor exercises pardon and commutation power without those extra reviews [2].
2. How often the Board of Parole Hearings is involved under Newsom
Newsom’s administration has routinely routed multiple-felony clemency matters to the Board of Parole Hearings as the statutorily required first step, including batches of cases announced in public clemency actions where the governor “sent multiple clemency cases to the Board of Parole Hearings” to initiate the process [1]. Local reporting on individual clemencies also notes that the Board has voted to recommend clemency in specific high-profile cases that then proceeded to the Supreme Court step [6]. Available sources therefore show that the Board is engaged on every case that meets the two-or-more-felonies threshold, but they do not provide a public log of every Board docket item, and many clemency filings remain sealed unless unsealed by motion [1] [7].
3. How often the California Supreme Court reviews Newsom’s multiple‑felony requests
By constitutional design the Supreme Court must be asked to concur for two-or-more-felonies cases, and Newsom has repeatedly submitted such requests to the Court [1] [4]. Reporting shows the Court has processed dozens of clemency requests across gubernatorial terms—68 clemency items in one review period and a flurry of matters late in Gov. Brown’s term that produced 10 rejections, for instance—illustrating the Court’s active gatekeeper role [8] [9]. Under Newsom, media and legal observers report that the Court has overwhelmingly concurred in his requests; counts vary by outlet, with one report saying the Court had approved virtually all of Newsom’s dozens of requests (approvals described as “all 86” in one retrospective) while others cite different tallies such as 20 or 60 approvals depending on the snapshot in time [3] [5] [4]. Those discrepancies reflect different cutoffs and the fact that some requests were withdrawn or remain pending [3] [4].
4. What “how often” looks like in practice — routine, frequent, and largely deferential
The practical pattern is that the Court’s review is a regular, procedural checkpoint rather than an infrequent extraordinary intervention: the Court evaluates requests to determine whether a proposed clemency would constitute an abuse of power and has described its review as deferential and limited in scope [10] [11]. Newsom’s office has repeatedly used that mechanism to process batches of commutations and pardons for people with multiple felonies, submitting dozens of requests over his tenure and obtaining the Board’s and Court’s concurrence in the vast majority of cases reported publicly [2] [4] [3].
5. Limits of the public record and alternative readings
Counting exact frequencies is hampered by sealed filings and varying media tallies: clemency files have historically been submitted under seal, and although the Supreme Court has pushed back on automatic secrecy and allowed case‑by‑case redactions, much of the granular docketing remains invisible until unsealed [7]. Critics argue that Newsom’s pattern—submitting numerous twice‑felony cases to the Board and Court and securing frequent concurrence—amounts to engineering parole eligibility for serious offenders and that the secrecy dampens public oversight [4], while defenders note the Court’s deferential standard and the executive’s policy goals in using clemency to incentivize rehabilitation and address systemic injustices [2] [11]. The sources confirm the institutional routine—Board review followed by Supreme Court concurrence is the required and regularly used process for multiple‑felony clemency matters—but they do not provide a single, definitive public tally of every Board or Supreme Court review across Newsom’s entire tenure without further unsealing or official logs [7] [1].