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Biden commutes sentences of 37 federal death row prisoners
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden announced on Monday that he is commuting a majority of those currently on federal death row, converting their punishments to life imprisonment weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Trump has been an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment.
Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row, the White House said in a statement.
It includes people convicted in killings, including the murders of police and military officers, people on federal land, and those involved in deadly bank robberies or drug deals, as well as the killings of guards or prisoners in federal facilities.
“I’ve dedicated my career to reducing violent crime and ensuring a fair and effective justice system,” Biden said.
“Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole,” Biden continued. “These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than 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’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.”
With Biden’s move, there are now just three federal inmates still facing execution.
They are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina;
2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in
2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
Trump, who takes office on Jan. 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, according to the Associated Press.
Those were also 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.
Martin Luther King III, who publicly urged Biden to change the death sentence, said in a statement issued 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.”
