Biden Considering Commuting the Sentences of All 40 Federal Death Row

We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

Joe Biden is considering the commutation of all prisoners on death row in federal prisons before he leaves office, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. It’s one more way that Biden is trying to “Trump-proof” the government to prevent the new president from taking actions he and his radical left supporters disagree with.

During his first term, Trump allowed the executions of 13 inmates to go forward. There are currently 40 federal inmates on death row and Biden wants to commute all their death sentences to life in prison without parole.

Since Trump was elected, religious groups, civil rights groups, and anti-death penalty activists have initiated a full-court press in lobbying the White House to get Biden to commute the sentences of federal death row inmates. A decision is expected before Christmas.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was appalled.

“It would mean that progressive politics is more important to the president than the lives taken by these murderers,” McConnell said in a floor speech Wednesday. “It would mean that society’s most forceful condemnation of white supremacy and antisemitism must give way to legal mumbo jumbo.”

In addition to the condemned men held by the Justice Department, four inmates sit on the military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. It was unclear whether any potential commutation would cover them, or how a White House decision might affect pending cases that could lead to a death sentence, including that of Luigi Mangione, who faces federal charges in the killing of healthcare executive Brian Thompson.

During his 2020 campaign, Biden listed abolition of the federal death penalty as a campaign plank, and over his term no executions have been carried out. In July 2021, Garland issued a moratorium on executions to review policies and procedures for capital punishment, particularly Trump-era policies that accelerated imposition of the death penalty. The Justice Department has provided no updates on the status of its review, but said in a recent court document that it is expected to be completed by March.

There is also the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other 9/11 conspirators. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is trying to reverse a military tribunal’s plea deal with lawyers for the terrorists that would take the death penalty off the table. It’s unclear whether Biden’s pending commutation would affect the terrorists or any other pending case that might include the death penalty.

Do some of these killers deserve mercy?

Those who could see their death sentences commuted to life in prison include an ex-Marine who killed two young girls and later a female naval officer; a Las Vegas man convicted of kidnapping and killing a 12-year-old girl; a Chicago podiatrist who fatally shot a patient to keep her from testifying in a Medicare fraud investigation; and two men convicted in a kidnapping-for-ransom scheme that resulted in the killings of five Russian and Georgian immigrants.

Biden may make some exceptions to his commutation plan for criminals who committed particularly “heinous” crimes. Among those are the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Tree of Life synagogue killer Robert Bowers, and Dylann Roof, who killed 9 people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. in 2015.

Biden has the right to commute anyone’s sentence for any reason. But by taking these men off of death row, he would be nullifying the decisions of juries and judges who were far more familiar with the details of these cases than some Justice Department lawyers. There’s a reason these men were sentenced to death and why appeals courts refused to alter that sentence.

They deserve it.