President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of nearly every prisoner on the federal government's death row, a sweeping decision designed to hinder President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to rapidly resume executions.
Biden will commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 men condemned to death, the second mass clemency in the weeks following the pardon he issued to his son, Hunter Biden.
The president called the death row commutations, which will instead sentence them to imprisonment for life without the possibility of parole, consistent with his administration’s moratorium on executions.
“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 Monday. “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.”
Biden added that the commutations were also spurred by Trump’s fervent support for capital punishment, saying he could not allow the incoming administration to restart executions for those he had spared over the last four years.
Thirteen federal inmates were put to death during Trump’s first term. In some instances, he took cases to the Supreme Court to defeat their final legal appeals.
Biden’s commutations exclude three prisoners convicted for what the president characterized as terrorism or “hate-motivated mass murder”: Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and mass shooters Robert Bowers — who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh — and Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
The move does nothing for people sentenced to death in state courts, which far outnumber the federal tally. The Death Penalty Information Center counts 2,241 people on death row at the state or federal level in the U.S. or face the possibility of being resentenced to death in a new trial.
Biden’s decision follows a Justice Department recommendation that he grant the commutations and amid increasing pressure from a range of groups that have advocated for a series of clemency actions in his final days. Though the administration has done little to follow through on Biden's 2020 campaign-trail support for abolishing the death penalty, it did halt all executions and conducted a review of capital punishment that the Justice Department is now on the verge of publishing.