Under pressure to fulfill a campaign promise before he leaves office, President Joe Biden will commute the sentences of nearly all federal inmates on death row to life in prison today, with the exception of three mass murderers.
The White House announced today that Biden is commuting the death penalty sentences of 37 out of 40 federal death row inmates, leaving only three sentences intact: those of Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, who killed nine black parishioners at a South Carolina church in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said in a White House statement. “But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
Biden faced pressure from a broad coalition of civil liberties, law enforcement, and religious groups—including Pope Francis—to fulfill a 2020 campaign pledge to end the federal death penalty. The Biden administration had imposed a moratorium on federal executions but continued to seek the death penalty in terrorism and mass-murder cases. For instance, the Justice Department recently filed capital charges against Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The issue took on life-and-death stakes after Donald Trump won reelection. The incoming Trump administration carried out 13 executions in the final six months of its first term and will almost surely lift the Biden administration’s moratorium.
Criminal justice groups applauded today’s news. Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said the commutations mark “an important turning point in ending America’s tragic and error-prone use of the death penalty.”
“By commuting almost all federal death sentences, President Biden has sent a strong message to Americans that the death penalty is not the answer to our country’s concerns about public safety,” Stevenson continued.
The commutations were supported not just by bleeding-heart liberals, but also by crime victims directly connected to some of the cases.
“I would like to commend President Biden for the important action he has taken today,” Donnie Oliverio, a retired police officer whose partner was killed by a man whose sentence was commuted today, said in a press release. “Putting to death the person who killed my police partner and best friend would have brought me no peace. The President has done what is right here, and what is consistent with the faith he and I share.”
That sentiment was not universal, though. Relatives of Joyce Fienberg, one of Robert Bowers’ victims in the Tree of Life shooting, wrote a letter to Biden urging him not to pardon Bowers.
“The pardon power should only be utilized on the merits of a case or crime, not en masse to further a political agenda,” the letter said. “Nothing in this crime merits a pardon or commutation of sentence.”
The matter of Biden’s sincerity about his faith and what it compels him to do is between him and the Catholic Church and God, but if he believes the death penalty is morally wrong, then of course it would be wrong to execute Bowers and the other two remaining death row inmates, and it would be wrong to continue seeking death sentences for future administrations to carry out. As Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review, the Biden administration’s populist death penalty stance—it’s philosophically unacceptable except for crimes of public notoriety—is cynical and insulting on any deeper reading.
But it will also placate most criminal justice groups and avoid the worst political blowback, and it will clear most of the federal death row before January 20 rolls around. In other words, it’s the sort of action that defined the Biden administration’s attempts to roll back a carceral system Biden helped create.
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