President Joe Biden has decided to commute the sentences of 37 out of the 40 individuals on federal death row. Their punishments are now being changed to life imprisonment. This move comes just before president-elect Donald Trump, a staunch supporter of expanding capital punishment, assumes office.
The decision leaves three federal inmates to face execution.
The commuting of sentences will spare the lives of those who were convicted of various crimes, such as killings of police and military officers, incidents on federal land, deadly bank robberies or drug deals, as well as the murders of guards or prisoners in federal facilities.
“Our judicial system is broken. Our government is a joke,” she said.
“Joe Biden’s decision is a clear gross abuse of power. He, and his supporters, have blood on their hands.”
Some of Roof’s victims supported Biden’s decision to leave him on death row.
One individual, Turner, expressed relief on social media, stating that the past seven years filled with pain and trauma have been unbearable. They mentioned feeling like the time spent seeking justice in court was now in vain.
“This was a crime against a race of people who were doing something all Americans do on a Wednesday night — go to Bible study,” Graham said.
“It didn’t matter who was there, only that they were Black.”
The Biden administration in 2021 announced a moratorium on federal capital punishment to study the protocols used, which suspended executions during Biden’s term.
But Biden actually had promised to go further on the issue in the past, pledging to end federal executions without the caveats for terrorism and hate-motivated, mass killings.
While running for president in 2020, Biden’s campaign website said he would “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivise states to follow the federal government’s example.”
Similar language didn’t appear on Biden’s re-election website before he left the presidential race in July.
“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’s statement said.
“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.”
He took a political jab at Trump, saying, “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
Trump, who takes office on January 20, has spoken frequently of expanding executions. In a speech announcing his 2024 campaign, Trump called for those “caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts.”
He later promised to execute drug and human smugglers and even praised China’s harsher treatment of drug peddlers.
During his first term as president, Trump also advocated for the death penalty for drug dealers.
There were 13 federal executions during Trump’s first term, more than under any president in modern history, and some may have happened fast enough to have contributed to the spread of the coronavirus at the federal death row facility in Indiana.
Those were the first federal executions since 2003.
The final three occurred after election day in November 2020 but before Trump left office the following January, the first time federal prisoners were put to death by a lame-duck president since Grover Cleveland in 1889.
Biden faced recent pressure from advocacy groups urging him to act to make it more difficult for Trump to increase the use of capital punishment for federal inmates.
The president’s announcement also comes less than two weeks after he commuted the sentences of roughly 1500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and of 39 others convicted of non-violent crimes, the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.
The announcement also followed the post-election pardon that Biden granted his son Hunter on federal gun and tax charges after long saying he would not issue one, sparking an uproar in Washington.
The pardon also raised questions about whether he would issue sweeping pre-emptive pardons for administration officials and other allies who the White House worries could be unjustly targeted by Trump’s second administration.
Speculation that Biden could commute federal death sentences intensified last week after the White House announced he planned to visit Italy on the final foreign trip of his presidency next month.
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Biden, a practicing Catholic, will meet with Pope Francis, who recently called for prayers for US death row inmates in hopes their sentences would be commuted.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has long called for an end to the death penalty, said Biden’s decision was a “significant step in advancing the cause of human dignity in our nation” and moves the country “a step closer to building a culture of life.”
Martin Luther King III, who publicly urged Biden to change the death sentences, said in a statement shared by the White House that the president “has done what no president before him was willing to do: take meaningful and lasting action not just to acknowledge the death penalty’s racist roots but also to remedy its persistent unfairness.”
Madeline Cohen, an attorney for Norris Holder, who faced death for the 1997 fatal shooting of a guard during a bank robbery in St Louis, said his case “exemplifies the racial bias and arbitrariness that led the president to commute federal death sentences,” Cohen said.
Holder, who is black, was sentenced by an all-white jury.
