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.
that any conservative crowed about him pardoning hunter is abject hypocrisy. he was just doing the most modest version of what trudmdfp would have done, in concordance with the values upheld by the arch-conservative supreme court. if anything, he’s going out with a whimper here. the supremes said “go nuts” and he’s barely begun to nut.
Another example of “American exceptionalism”. I did a quick Goog of other culturally similar countries as to when the death penalty ended:
New Zealand 1957
Canada 1962
UK 1964
Australia 1967
All more than half a century ago.
Biden: better too late than whatever.
I note the 3 exceptions to commutation:
@6: yeah -- if someone does something particularly heinous (i.e. worse than “just” murdering someone), then as a society you have no choice but to sink to their level, right?
I’ve long said there ought to be a properly democratic referendum on the death penalty, binding on participants. The referendum would offer two questions:
1. do you support the state having the right to execute any person found guilty of what the state defines as serious crime at the time of the trial (may include e.g. murder, rape, jaywalking)? YES/NO.
2. Given the unarguable fact that the justice system is fallible and that if there is a death penalty available sooner or later an innocent person will definitely be executed, do you, personally, volunteer to be the first such person, today? YES/NO.
Anyone voting NO to (1) need not answer (2).
Anyone voting YES to (1) but NO to (2) doesn’t have their vote counted, because what they mean by (1) isthey just support the death penalty for OTHER people -- not them. So they either didn’t read the question properly or didn’t really mean it. Either way, their vote is void, because they don’t understand what a society is.
Anyone voting YES to both (1) and (2) gets precisely ONE explanation of why it’s a bad idea and the chance to change their mind, and if their vote stands they’re shot in the back of the head as they leave the polling booth. Their voted is counted, though -- to their credit, they meant it.
If “YES” to (1) wins, simply rerun the vote the next day. It won’t take long to reach the correct result.
I know sonofroj pretends not to read my comments, but to me this is not only generalisable, but obviously so.
In a just society, one cannot grant for oneself rights one denies to others.
Any protections one claims for oneself must be granted to others.
This seems so obvious to me but I routinely see “progressives” not get it.
Sure you can have a society where you can kill people as long as you feel they’re bad enough. (Like random CEOs)
The price is a society where anyone at all can kill you as long as they feel you’re bad enough. For any reason.
To quote Dirty Harry; “Feeling lucky, punk?:
You’re thinking “Did he commute thirty-seven sentences or only thirty-six?” Now to tell you the truth, I’ve forgotten myself in all this excitement. But being the 46th president, the most powerful leader in the world, I will blow your mind with all the people I’m gonna pardon. you’ve gotta ask yourself a question: “Will I commute *your* sentence punk?”
I have to wonder who exactly is doing the shooting. It can’t be someone who voted NO/NO, since such a person wouldn’t shoot. It can’t be someone who voted YES/NO, since such a person is considered too confused to have their vote count. And it can’t be someone who voted YES/YES, since all people who vote YES/YES are shot.
It doesn’t help if you say that it’s the booth itself that is automatically programmed to shoot. Clearly, the booth had to have been designed by a YES/YES engineer (and maintained by YES/YES mechanics) — who should have been shot before they implemented the design, presumably by some other YES/YES voter, who shouldn’t be alive because they should have been shot (. . . and so on, ad infinitum).
If you allow the system to be designed and run and maintained by YES/NO voters, you’ve blown away your own argument that YES/NO votes shouldn’t count.
It’s like the barber’s paradox, only with bullets.
LOL, nice one.
But think again. I’m obviously strongly NO/NO (as anyone with a shred of intelligence would be). I abhor the concept of the state depriving someone of their liberty and then cold-bloodedly murdering them, despite having full control over their movements. I’d never participate in or support in any way that activity.
But (and Sir Mixalot would like it, because it’s a BIG but) I also absolutely respect and support the right of every individual to end their life at a time of their choosing (assuming it doesn’t egregiously impact the wellbeing of others -- so no jumping in front of a train or onto a motorway, for instance).
I can see no moral problem with building and maintaining a machine that removes the life from people who’d actively volunteered for that to happen. Think about it: it’s not execution, it’s euthanasia.
I personally would have no moral problem with personally pulling the trigger on such a person -- it would be a win/win situation, since they’ve asked for it and by definition removing them from society and especially the gene pool would be a definite societal benefit.
Note: the phrase “pulling the trigger”, and the description that prompted it, implies for brevity a rather personal and destructive euthanasia. In reality I’d propose a method that was
-- more humane (i.e. painless and quick for the volunteer)
-- less traumatic (for those required to administrate/clean up after the process)
-- even more societally beneficial (e.g. in an ideal world, any suitable volunteers’ organs would be harvested)
Devising such a method is left as an exercise for the reader.