As his term of office winds down, Joe Biden is trying to minimize the damage that Trump can do and one of things is the federal death penalty. The federal death penalty had.not been carried out for 17 years but when Trump took office in 2017, he proceeded to carry them out with vigor. Biden put back the moratorium when he took office in 2021 but there were still 40 people on death row. He has now commuted 37 of those.
Biden has been somewhat of a vacillator on the death penalty, supporting it during the heyday of ‘get tough on crime’ but then evolving as the political climate changed.
Biden’s journey on the issue has been complicated. As a senator, he championed a 1994 crime bill that expanded the federal death penalty to cover 60 new offences. He boasted: “I am the guy who put these death penalties in this bill.” The legislation is now widely seen as having contributed to mass incarceration, particularly affecting Black men, and many of those currently on death row were sentenced under its provisions.
But during his 2020 presidential election campaign, Biden reversed his long-held support for capital punishment, pledging to eliminate it at the federal level. He cited concerns about wrongful convictions and racial disparities in the justice system.
The Biden administration duly imposed a moratorium on federal executions. Calls for the president to commute the federal death sentences mounted in recent weeks. He received letters from corrections officials, business leaders, Black pastors, Catholics, civil and human rights advocates, prosecutors, former judges, victim family members and others. Pope Francis publicly offered a prayer for those on federal death row, urging Biden to extend mercy to them.
The White House said Biden’s latest action would prevent the next administration from carrying out the execution sentences that would not be handed down under current policy and practice.
His move has been welcomed by many who not only opposed the death penalty on principle but also because of perceived discrimination in the way it was applied.
The majority of the 40 men held on federal death row are people of color, and 38% are Black, Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, previously told the Guardian. Nearly one in four men were 21 or younger at the time of the crime.
Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative, said: “Today marks an important turning point in ending America’s tragic and error-prone use of the death penalty. 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.”
Martin Luther King III, the son of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, added: “This is a historic day. 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.”
Biden had also issued other pardons and clemency measures.
According to the White House, Biden has issued more commutations at this point in his presidency than any of his recent predecessors at the same point in their first terms. Earlier this month he announced clemency for about 1,500 Americans – the most ever in a single day – who have shown successful rehabilitation and a commitment to making communities safer.
Biden is also the first president to issue categorical pardons to individuals convicted of simple use and possession of marijuana and to former LGBTQ+ service members convicted of private conduct because of their sexual orientation.
Earlier this month the president sparked a political outcry by pardoning his son, Hunter, for federal felony gun and tax convictions that could have led to a prison sentence. Biden, who leaves office on 20 January, had repeatedly promised not to issue such a pardon.
The system of justice at the federal and state levels are heavily weighted towards meting out harsh punishments, especially to poor people and people of color. The presidential pardon power is one way to correct some of the extreme punishments and I am glad that Biden has used it. I hope he does more in his last month in office.
I’m not sure that 538 is a great source; but I remember them once saying something that seems to be a simple statement of fact: based on Biden’s votes in Congress, he was always pretty much the median Democrat. My takeaway from that was that he has no firm principles of his own, but just likes the view from the Overton window.
In any event, I agree that stopping the killing (or most of it) is the right thing to do.
Another show of moral cowardice, either the state should not kill anyone, or the courts followed the law at the time and what was decided should stand. I personally think the former should be the case and allowing any death penalty gives future administrations, both federal and states’, free rein to pick and choose what the criteria for applying it are.