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Biden’s decision marks first presidential commutation of death sentence since 2017.
Three individuals involved in terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder remain on death row.
Trump’s administration is widely expected to restart executions.
US President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row to life without parole, taking the unprecedented step ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, whose incoming administration is widely expected to restart executions.
Opponents of capital punishment have been urging Biden to use his final weeks in office to empty federal death row before Trump reclaims the White House. Trump is a longtime supporter of the death penalty, and his first administration carried out 13 federal executions.
Biden’s sweeping decision, which marks the first presidential commutation of a death sentence since 2017, still keeps three people on federal death row, those the President said were involved in cases of “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder”.
“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 statement explaining his decision.
“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 added. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
US President Joe Biden has commuted the death sentences of 37 prisoners to life without parole. Photo / Getty Images
Biden’s decision to intervene in even one death penalty case caps a remarkable turnaround for him on this issue. A longtime advocate for the death penalty, Biden ran for the presidency in 2020 as an opponent who pledged to try to end its use.
His administration, however, has taken an inconsistent approach to capital punishment. The Justice Department halted federal executions during Biden’s presidency while also seeking new death sentences and defending existing ones in court.
With Trump’s next term looming, a broad array of groups and people opposing the death penalty – including civil rights groups, religious organisations, current and former law enforcement officials, ex-prison workers and murder victims’ relatives – had called on Biden to commute the federal capital sentences.
In letters and public appeals, they listed several criticisms of capital punishment, saying it was wasteful, biased and prone to error. Many arguments rested on the issue of Trump, who they fear will resume executions. Some pleas also invoked Biden’s Catholic faith, and Pope Francis – with whom Biden is scheduled to meet next month during his final foreign trip as President – used a recent address to pray for the death row inmates in the United States to be spared from execution.
‘Meaningful and lasting action’
Seeking to address any backlash that could come from death penalty supporters, the White House distributed a list of statements from various people applauding his decision, including some murder victims’ relatives, former correctional leaders and criminal justice reform advocates.
Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, called it “an important turning point in ending America’s tragic and error-prone use of the death penalty”.
Martin Luther King III said it marked “meaningful and lasting action not just to acknowledge the death penalty’s racist roots but also to remedy its persistent unfairness”.
Donnie Oliverio, a retired police officer in Columbus, Ohio, whose partner was killed by one of the men whose death sentence was commuted, said he also supported the decision.
“Putting to death the person who killed my police partner and best friend would have brought me no peace,” he said. “The President has done what is right here, and what is consistent with the faith he and I share.”
Biden has faced criticism for not granting clemency to more people convicted of other types of federal crimes, especially after he pardoned his son Hunter Biden on December 1. Biden later granted clemency to hundreds of people convicted of non-violent crimes.
Last year, federal prosecutors also won a death sentence for Bowers, the gunman who massacred 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Relatives of Joyce Fienberg, one of the victims in that case, wrote a letter to Biden this month begging him not to lift the gunman’s sentence, saying it was delivered after a fair trial and was a necessary punishment.
“The pardon power should only be utilised on the merits of a case or crime, not en masse to further a political agenda,” stated the letter, which was signed by Anthony and Howard Fienberg, Joyce Fienberg’s sons. “Nothing in this crime merits a pardon or commutation of sentence.”
13 lethal injections
The Biden administration also has defended the death sentences given to the Boston Marathon bomber and the Charleston church gunman. Both of those attacks, and the trials that resulted in their death sentences, occurred during the Obama administration, while Biden was Vice-President.
“These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder,” Biden said in the statement.
During Trump’s first term, the Justice Department restarted federal executions for the first time in nearly two decades. After legal challenges delayed the first of these executions until the summer of 2020, Trump’s administration carried out 13 lethal injections that year and into 2021, including some in the days before Biden was sworn in.
The federal death-penalty population accounts for a relatively small share of the people sentenced to death throughout the country. A Washington Post examination this year found that there are more than 2100 prisoners with death sentences nationwide, more than half of them in jurisdictions where executions are paused. Nearly half of all people with death sentences were sentenced at least a quarter-century ago, The Post has found.
Presidents can only commute federal cases, so Biden cannot act on death sentences delivered at the state level.
His move to nearly empty out federal death row echoes the sweeping grants of clemency that some governors have issued in their own states. Most recently, then-Oregon Governor Kate Brown commuted that state’s 17 death sentences shortly before leaving office in 2022.
Public support dropping
Capital punishment has declined across the country in recent decades, with executions and new death sentences both plummeting. Public support has also fallen, according to polling.
Biden through much of his political career was a strong proponent of the death penalty, and the 1994 crime bill that he wrote expanded it to include other crimes.
It passed at a time when voters were deeply alarmed about drug use and violent crime, with Democrats scrambling to combat Republican claims that they were weak on crime. Biden was at the centre of those efforts and was proud of his role.
He called offenders “predators”, said some offenders should “fry”, noted that some people wanted to “hang ‘em high” and bragged repeatedly that “I am the guy who put these death penalties in this bill”.
Decades later, when he ran for President in 2020, he distanced himself from some of those past positions. And he also ran as an opponent of the death penalty and said he wanted to eliminate it at the federal level.
Throughout much of his time in office, however, he has not spoken about the death penalty. Legislation never passed to change its use, leaving his only ability to alter it with his presidential powers to pardon and commute sentences.
Nearly all of those who were on death row were there because of the law Biden wrote, meaning that he had a significant role in both placing them there – and now, as President, sparing their lives.
They include people like Norris Holder, who had lost his leg in a train accident and was dependent on an ill-fitting prosthesis in 1997 when he and an accomplice robbed the Lindell Bank & Trust in St Louis. He was 21 and, his lawyer says, desperate for money to buy a better artificial leg and ease his excruciating pain. But during the robbery, a security guard was shot and killed.
Holder had difficulty escaping and was quickly arrested. Because Biden’s law included murder during a bank robbery as one of the crimes that became eligible for the death penalty, he was sentenced to death.
Biden on Monday said he is commuting Holder’s sentence as well as that of his accomplice, Billie Allen.
Another person whose sentence Biden is commuting is Rejon Taylor, who was convicted of killing someone during a kidnapping and carjacking, a crime that the 1994 law deemed punishable by death. Taylor, an 18-year-old black man with no prior criminal record, was tried before a nearly all-white jury.
He has transformed over 21 years in prison, his lawyers say, expressing remorse and serving as a minister of sorts to fellow death-row inmates.
“This is just not someone you would imagine on death row,” Kelley J Henry, Taylor’s attorney, said in an interview last week, ahead of Biden’s decision. “And not someone President Biden would have envisioned on death row, either.”
