Three years after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an initiative to pardon LGBTQ Californians who were prosecuted for being gay, only one living person has benefited from the program.
The governor launched the LGBTQ California Clemency Initiative in February 2020 and vowed to eradicate "historic homophobia" in the criminal justice system by offering pardons to people "subjected to discriminatory arrest and prosecution." The program focuses on charges such as vagrancy, loitering and sodomy that were used to target LGBTQ people and may remain on their criminal records decades later.
But besides a posthumous pardon announced with its launch of renowned civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who died in 1987, only one other person has benefited so far. Henry Pachnowski, an 83-year-old man living in Maryland, was pardoned last year for a lewd conduct charge for participating in consensual sexual activity with another man in Orange County in 1967.
