WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of all but three of the 40 people on federal death row, citing his long-standing opposition to capital punishment.
By his action, Biden also denies the incoming Trump administration the chance to green-light the convicts' executions. The first Trump administration carried out 13 executions of death-row inmates, a record for a single presidential term.
The 37 men, who will now spend the rest of their lives in prison without the possibility of parole, landed on death row because juries found them guilty of brutal crimes that ended the lives of others. Most of these men have been awaiting their sentence for more than a decade.
“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 accompanying the announcement. “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. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
One man, Thomas Steven Sanders of Louisiana, was found guilty of kidnapping and killing a 12-year-old girl, after fatally shooting her mother. And a California kidnapping-and-serial-killing duo, Jurijus Kadamovas and Iouri Mikhel, were sentenced to death for the killings of five people, including the strangling of a pregnant woman. They had attempted to get ransom from the victims but ended up killing all of them anyway.
Excluded from the list are three men convicted for crimes that Biden described as “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”
That group is headlined by Dylann Roof, who in 2015 killed nine members of a historically Black South Carolina church in what prosecutors said was an attempt to spark a race war. In his sentencing, prosecutors quoted Roof’s prison diary, in which he wrote: “I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed.” He went on, in that entry, to espouse racist beliefs, and concluded: “I have shed a tear of self-pity for myself. I feel pity that I had to do what I did in the first place.”
Also excluded were Robert Bowers, convicted over the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, the 2018 shooting of 11 members of Pittsburgh's Tree of life Synagogue, and 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He said during interrogation that he and his older brother – who was killed in a police shootout while they were on the run – were planning another attack in central New York City.
Biden announced a moratorium on federal executions soon after taking office in 2021. On Monday, he also touted his announcement earlier in December on bestowing the largest-ever act of clemency in a single day by an American president, affecting about 1,500 people who had been placed in home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Also in December, Biden announced his highest-profile pardon of all: that of his son Hunter, on federal gun and tax charges. Biden’s announcement sparked outrage as he had maintained throughout his presidency that he would not pardon his son. In his statement, he said he believed his son had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.”
Members of Biden’s party largely applauded Monday’s commutations. Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 of the 50 American states, and in Washington, D.C., the capital.
“I have long advocated for reforms to make our justice system more fair and effective, and that includes ending the use of the death penalty which has not been shown to reduce crime,” said Virginia Democratic Representative Bobby Scott in a statement. “I applaud President Biden for commuting these sentences to life sentences without the possibility of parole. The Biden Administration placed a moratorium on federal executions and this will ensure the incoming Administration cannot easily resume the practice.”
Some of Trump’s supporters openly disagreed.
In a post on social media platform X, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote, “When given the choice between law-abiding Americans or criminals, Joe Biden and Democrats choose criminals every time.”
Hardline Republican Representative Chip Roy called the president's decision unconscionable. "The Presidents pardon power is being abused by @JoeBiden to carry out a miscarriage of justice," he wrote.
The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union described Biden’s decision as “the most consequential step of any president in our history to address the immoral and unconstitutional harms of capital punishment.”
“With a stroke of his pen, the President locks in his legacy as a leader who stands for racial justice, humanity, and morality,” said Anthony D. Romero, in a statement. “This will undoubtedly be one of the seminal achievements of the Biden presidency.”
And criminal justice reform advocates pushed for more.
“We do not need to kill people to show that killing is wrong in this country,” said Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative. “The death penalty is a torturous, flawed, expensive, and error-filled practice that must be abolished. I commend President Biden for this historic act and hope that governors and state executives follow the president’s lead at a time when many of our courts are abandoning their role to ensure fairness and reliability in criminal cases. Leadership by elected officials will be more critical than ever.”
The United States is in the minority of countries that impose a federal death penalty. Recent U.S. polls show younger Americans have driven down the public’s appetite for this punishment, with less than half of Americans born after 1981 supporting the practice.
Trump, in his first term, pushed through 13 federal executions – the last one, just days before he left office – earning him the dubious distinction of overseeing more executions than any other U.S. president in more than a century. Trump has frequently praised what he says is China’s practice of swift trials and immediate execution for drug dealers.
China leads the world in imposing thousands of death sentences each year, according to the non-partisan Death Penalty Information Center, which says it “does not take a position on the death penalty itself but is critical of problems in its application.”
It is not known how many people are actually executed by the state, as Beijing does not release that information.
