President Joe Biden is facing growing pressure to commute the sentences of the more than three dozen inmates sitting on federal death row before President-elect Donald Trump, a death penalty proponent, enters the White House.
Since losing the election, Biden has received an influx of calls from activists pleading with him to grant the commutations, which would prevent the near certain executions of several of the 40 death row inmates who would be eligible for execution once Trump takes office.
Joe Biden’s controversial move to pardon his son Hunter Biden and reports that he is mulling pardons for Trump’s political nemeses have served to bolster the clemency calls.
Andrew Fleischman, an Atlanta-based defense lawyer, said he supports Joe Biden granting clemency to the death row inmates, noting that the death penalty has no public safety benefit and uses enormous resources.
“It’s good policy, saves the public a bunch of money, and helps get the taste of that Hunter pardon out of the public’s mouth,” Fleischman told the Washington Examiner.
Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project criticized Joe Biden, 82, for using his clemency authority to help his son before using it for those on death row.
“As he enters the twilight of his presidency and his life, he apparently decided that protecting his family was more important than maintaining a certain kind of abstract legal system legitimacy,” Bruenig wrote.
Nicholas Cote, a strategist with Conservatives Concerned, a group that opposes the death penalty, told the Washington Examiner that his group believes both federal and state death penalties are “arbitrarily and unfairly” administered and that Biden should therefore commute all 40 death sentences before leaving office.
Biden’s clemency decision could mean life or death for defendants in several high-profile cases, including the Boston marathon bomber and the gunmen responsible for killing nine black parishioners at a South Carolina church and 11 Jewish people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pennsylvania. Dylann Roof, the South Carolina killer, is currently being housed at the maximum-security prison for death row inmates in Terre Haute, Indiana, and he has a pending commutation application filed with the Justice Department.
Biden’s clemency could also put an end to some incredibly protracted and expensive prosecutions, a common feature of death penalty cases. For instance, Anthony Battle, who beat a prison guard to death with a hammer after he was imprisoned for murdering his wife, has been on death row since 1997.
Since the election, more than 60 Democratic members of Congress, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a coalition led by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers have been demanding Biden commute the inmates’ sentences, warning the Trump administration will move quickly to execute them.
“We hope for a clemency decision that would temper justice with mercy and spare the lives of some 40 individuals on federal death row by commuting their sentences to life without parole,” NACDL Executive Director Lisa Wayne told the Washington Examiner.
The commutations will “make Trump’s brutal plans for another killing spree impossible,” the ACLU wrote.
The calls come after the first Trump administration made historic use of the death penalty. Sixteen federal executions have been carried out since 1988, all by lethal injection. Thirteen of them were under Trump’s tenure, all during his final six months in office after Attorney General Bill Barr lifted an Obama-era freeze on them.
Trump has since vowed to expand the death penalty to crimes not involving homicide, including drug trafficking. He has also said he would seek a “quicker trial, not a trial that lasts 15 years and everybody gets exhausted” for those facing death sentences.
Biden campaigned on abolishing the death penalty, a promise that is unfeasible to fulfill at this stage. And while no federal executions have been carried out during his time in office, his administration has flip-flopped on the matter at times.
Attorney General Merrick Garland first announced a moratorium on the death penalty in 2021, but the Biden administration stirred frustration among death penalty opponents by changing gears in January and asking for a death sentence for 20-year-old Payton Gendron. Gendron pleaded guilty to murdering 10 black people in a racially motivated attack at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022.
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Prosecutors under Biden also asked for the death penalty in two cases brought by the Trump administration: Robert Bowers’s murder of the 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue and Islamic extremist Sayfullo Saipov’s murder of eight people in a New York City bike path.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this story.