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HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Today's decision by @CAgovernor @GavinNewsom to commute California's death row is the single largest grant of death-row clemency in U.S. history and the largest reduction in the U.S. death-row population since Furman v. Georgia struck down all existing death penalty statutes in 1972. Furman vacated the death sentences of 630 prisoners across the United States. Today's proposed grant of universal clemency will remove 538 people from death row. The next largest reduction in the U.S. death row population came in 1976 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared mandatory death penalty statutes to be unconstitutional. Those rulings, in Woodson v. North Carolina and Roberts v. Louisiana, took 326 people in ten states off death row. Governor Newsom's grant of universal clemency surpasses President Lincoln's commutation of 264 Dakota tribesmen after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 as the largest single act of death-penalty clemency. Lincoln's commutations, however, still left 39 death sentences in place, leading to the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Previously, the largest modern grant of death-row clemency was on January 10 and 11, 2003 when Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned four death-row prisoners and commuted the death sentences of 167 others, clearing the state's death row and leading to the state's subsequent abolition of the death penalty on March 9, 2011.