Existing federal capital punishment sentences could soon be replaced with life in prison, the paper said
US President Joe Biden is weighing in on commuting the sentences of 40 federal death row inmates before he leaves office, the Washington Post has reported, citing informed sources.
If the outgoing US president makes the move, their sentences will be replaced with life in prison without parole, the paper said in an article on Friday.
Such a step “would frustrate President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to resume the rapid pace of executions that marked his first term,” WaPo stressed.
There were 13 federal executions during Trump’s first term and there have been none under Biden. Abolishing the federal death penalty was among the Democratic president’s campaign promises.
Trump did vow to restart executions during the race for the White House. “I am hereby calling for the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer,” he said at a rally in October.
The decision by Biden to replace death penalties with life in prison could be announced before Christmas (December 25), the sources said.
The biggest question now is whether the president should issue a blanket commutation or make exceptions for convicts who have committed the gravest crimes, they added.
According to people familiar with the matter, Attorney General Merrick Garland, who oversees federal prisons, suggested that Biden keep capital punishment in place for a “handful” of inmates convicted of terrorism and hate crimes.
Possible exceptions could include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 that left three dead and more than 250 others wounded; Robert Bowers, who shot and killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; and Dylann Roof, who took nine lives at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, the report read.
The Republicans are “appalled” by the possibility of Biden commuting the death sentences, the Washington Post said.
It cited Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said earlier this week that “it would mean that progressive politics is more important to the president than the lives taken by these murderers.”
“It would mean that society’s most forceful condemnation of white supremacy and antisemitism must give way to legal mumbo jumbo,” McConnell insisted.
Biden’s alleged commutation would only affect the 40 inmates on federal death row. He has no authority over the almost 2,200 prisoners who have been sentenced to capital punishment in the US by state courts.
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