WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 federal prisoners on Monday, using his presidential clemency powers to reduce their sentences to life imprisonment without parole.
Biden’s actions would leave just three inmates on federal death row, according to a roster of pending death sentences from the Death Penalty Information Centre.
Those exceptions represent the most notorious cases: Robert Bowers, convicted in the killing of 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, convicted of killing nine churchgoers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of murder in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
The White House said in a statement that Biden “believes that America must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level, except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder — which is why today’s actions apply to all but those cases.”
In doing so, Biden spared the lives of more federal inmates than any president since Woodrow Wilson commuted the death sentences of 59 inmates more than a century ago.
The commutations are likely to provoke a firestorm of criticism. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell last week said the expected clemency would show that “progressive politics is more important to the president than the lives taken by these murderers.”
Of the 40 men on federal Death Row in Terre Haute, Indiana, 18 are White, 15 are Black, six are Latino and one is Asian.
At least nine of the spared convicts were on death row for killing a fellow prisoner or guard while already in prison.
1994 crime bill
As a senator from Delaware, Biden was the lead author of a 1994 crime bill that expanded the death penalty for dozens of new offences.
“We do everything but hang people for jaywalking,” Biden boasted.
But by his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden had a change of heart. He promised to support legislation to eliminate the death penalty, although that bill never reached his desk and he rarely addressed the issue.
Biden’s position follows the trajectory of public opinion. Support for the death penalty reached an all-time high of 80 per cent the same month that President Bill Clinton signed Biden’s bill into law, according to Gallup. As of October it was just 53 per cent.
Death penalty abolitionists had urged Biden to commute the death sentences before Donald Trump takes office next month. Trump oversaw 13 executions in the last six months of his presidency - the most since the US Supreme Court affirmed the use of the penalty in 1976.
Those pleas intensified this month after Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter Biden for all federal crimes — charged or uncharged — between 2014 and 2024. The younger Biden had been awaiting sentencing on gun and tax evasion charges, and the pardon sparked an uproar because of its breadth and the fact that the president repeatedly denied that he would use his power to help his son.
Biden also shortened the sentences of 1,499 federal convicts serving home incarceration this month. Those recipients included several public corruption cases, including former Dixon, Illinois, comptroller Rita Crundwell, convicted of embezzling more than $53 million in the biggest municipal fraud in history.
The White House suggested that Biden isn’t done using his presidential clemency powers and will “take additional steps to provide meaningful second chances” before leaving office.
Under the US Constitution, the president has the power “to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.” The Constitution leaves only two exceptions: impeachments and state crimes.
Until this month, Biden had been on track to use presidential clemency more sparingly than any president since John Adams. When including categorical pardons for those convicted of marijuana offenses, Biden has now granted more clemency than Barack Obama, and could surpass Harry Truman.
The Office of the Pardon Attorney, the Justice Department lawyers who review petitions from federal convicts, had a backlog of more than 15,000 cases as of September 30.
