President Joe Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of nearly every federal death row inmate to life in prison without the chance for parole has ignited a fierce debate about the morality of executing convicted murderers and what constitutes as justice for the families of their victims.
Biden faced backlash from a spokesman for President-elect Donald Trump, congressional Republicans and a House Democrat who questioned whether the president was overstepping his bounds by usurping the work of courts and juries with his lame duck move on Monday morning to commute the sentences of 37 out of 40 death row prisoners.
The Democratic president also faced criticism from some anti-death penalty activists who said he didn’t go far enough, including a family member of one victim, who said Biden’s commutations should have extended to the other three federal inmates facing the death penalty.
“I need the President to understand that when you put a killer on death row, you also put their victim’s families in limbo with the false promise that we must wait until there is an execution before we can begin to heal,” said the Rev. Sharon Risher, whose mother and two cousins were killed in 2015 at the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Arguing for the commutation of the convicted shooter Dylann Roof’s death sentence, Risher added: “Politics has gotten in the way of mercy. You can’t rank victims, Mr. President.”
Supporters of Biden’s decision countered that he was showing moral leadership and praised him for making progress on a campaign pledge to end the federal death penalty. In a statement accompanying the news, the president said that he could not in “good conscience” allow the planned executions of the individuals on federal death row to move forward.
Biden cited his work as a public defender and Trump’s support for the death penalty as guiding factors.
Trump did not comment on the commutations directly, even as he posted about other topics on Monday on his social media platform. A spokesman for Trump criticized Biden on the president-elect’s behalf.
“These are among the worst killers in the world and this abhorrent decision by Joe Biden is a slap in the face to the victims, their families, and their loved ones,” said Trump communications director Steven Cheung.
Biden had been under pressure from congressional Democrats and anti-death penalty activists prior to Monday’s announcement to commute the sentences of death row inmates before he left office. Pope Francis also pushed Biden, who is Catholic and spoke to the pontiff last week, to prevent the executions.
In all but three cases, Biden obliged. He did not commute the sentences of Robert Bowers, who was convicted for the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue that left 11 dead in Pittsburgh; Roof, who was convicted in the Mother Emmanuel Church mass shooting where nine people died; or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured more than 260.
Biden promised as a candidate for president to end the death penalty in 2020 and said in a statement that he did not want the deaths of the roughly three dozen other people weighing on him after he leaves office.
“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” he said. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”