Biden commutes most federal death sentences before Trump takes office

President Joe Biden on Monday said he was 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 had 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 marks the first presidential commutation of a death sentence since President Barack Obama took two prisoners off death row in 2017. Biden kept death sentences in place for three federal prisoners, who he said were involved in cases of “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”

Those he did not spare are: Dylann Roof, the white supremacist convicted of killing nine Black parishioners at a South Carolina church in 2015; Robert Bowers, who carried out the country’s deadliest antisemitic attack when he killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber.

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 2,100 prisoners with death sentences nationwide, more than half of them in jurisdictions where executions are paused. Nearly half of people with death sentences were sentenced at least a quarter-century ago.

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 states. Most recently, then-Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) commuted that state’s 17 death sentences shortly before leaving office in 2022.

“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 to commute all but three of the sentences.

“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.”

A spokesman for Trump, Steven Cheung, said those whose sentences were commuted were “among the worst in the world” and called the decision to take them off death row “a slap in the face to the victims, their families, and their loved ones.”

Biden’s action caps a remarkable turnaround for him on this issue. He ran for president in 2020 as an opponent of the death penalty and pledged to try to end its use. As a lawmaker decades ago, however, he was a strong supporter of 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 organizations, current and former law enforcement officials, ex-prison workers and relatives of murder victims - had called on Biden to commute the federal capital sentences.

In letters and public appeals, they said capital punishment 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.

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’s administration has not entirely abandoned the death penalty since he took office. Federal prosecutors have said they plan to seek the death penalty for the attacker who shot and killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store. Last year, prosecutors 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 utilized on the merits of a case or crime, not en masse to further a political agenda,” said 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.”

The Biden administration also has defended the death sentences given to the Boston Marathon bomber and the Charleston, South Carolina, 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.

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 additional 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 center of those efforts and was proud of his role. He called offenders “predators” and said some offenders should “fry.”

Decades later, when he ran for president in 2020, he distanced himself from some of those past positions.

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 such as 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. He has produced artwork and poetry and written an essay about his complicated feelings after forming a connection with Roof.

“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.”

In his final weeks in office, Biden separately 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 Dec. 1.

Days later, in what the White House touted as the “largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history,” Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people who had been placed on home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic, and pardoned 39 individuals convicted of nonviolent crimes.

But those people were not individually vetted by the Justice Department, which carefully considers the circumstances of each case before issuing a recommendation. Biden still must decide whether to approve clemency petitions for hundreds of people cleared by the Justice Department, most of whom remain behind bars.