President Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of most inmates on federal death row, a historic executive action that is being celebrated by racial and social justice advocates.
The president on Monday announced that he would issue commutations for 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. A majority of inmates on federal death row are Black (38%) and Latino (15%), according to Death Penalty Information Center.
“I’ve dedicated my career to reducing violent crime and ensuring a fair and effective justice system,” President Biden said in a statement. However, he emphasized, “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.”
Monday’s announcement is consistent with the Biden administration’s active moratorium on the federal death penalty. President Biden has long been a critic of the death penalty and, as a presidential candidate in 2020, vowed to abolish the practice. The White House noted that the president’s exceptions on the federal death are in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.
Only three death row inmates did not receive commutations from the president: Dylan Roof, who fatally shot nine Black Americans inside Mother Emanual AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013; and Robert Bowers, who shot and killed 11 Jewish Americans at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Rev. Sharon Risher, the daughter of Ethel Lance, one of the nine victims killed by Roof during bible study, as well as the cousin victims Susie Jackson and Tywanza Sanders, called on Biden to halt the death sentence of her mother and cousins’ killer during a congressional briefing panel hosted by U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., earlier this month.
“I learned that my mother and my loved ones were gunned down by a white supremacist trying to start a race war. He is not an innocent man on death row, but he is a man. He has humanity, and I have been willing and worked hard to give forgiveness to [him],” said Risher. “I do not want him to die. To spend the rest of his life in prison? Yes. But not for him to die in the name of my family. We are urging you, President Biden. I hope you hear my words. I hope you get to hear the pain in my voice.”
President Biden said his decision was guided by his “conscience” and experience as a former public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and later vice president and now president.
Biden cited fears about incoming President-elect Donald Trump for part of his execution action, saying, “I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
In his final weeks in office during his last administration, then-President Trump ordered the execution of 13 individuals on death row.
Dreisen Heath, a racial justice advocate who personally worked on efforts to end the death penalty with the Human Rights Watch, told theGrio that Trump’s execution spree was the “most in the modern day era.” Over the years, Heath and other advocates have repeatedly called on the Biden White House to go further than the administration’s death penalty moratorium and fulfill Biden’s 2020 campaign promise to completely abolish it.
“The current moratorium just isn’t enough because… it opened the door wide open to the next administration to use and abuse that power,” said Heath.
Racial and social justice advocates are applauding the announcement from President Biden, who remains in office for only 28 days.
Martin Luther King III, who publicly urged President Biden to commute the sentences of federal death row inmates, praised the decision as marking a “historic day.”
King added, “By commuting these sentences, President Biden 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.”
“Today marks an important turning point in ending America’s tragic and error-prone use of the death penalty,” said Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which provides legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, poor prisoners without effective representation and others who may have faced unfair trails.
“By commuting almost all federal death sentences, President Biden has sent a strong message to Americans that the death penalty is not the answer to our country’s concerns about public safety,” said Stevenson. He added, “I commend President Biden for recognizing that we don’t have to kill people to show that killing is wrong, that we can and should reduce violence in our communities by refusing to sanction more violence and killing in our courts and prisons.”
Jamilla Hodge, CEO of Equal Justice USA, said President Biden’s commutation strikes a “blow against racism and a system that has always targeted Black people.”
Hodge continued, “This action, aligned with your more recent pardons, reaffirms our shared belief in the dignity and value of all human life and the possibility of redemption in everyone.”
