During his last six months as president, Donald Trump’s administration carried out an unprecedented wave of executionswhich killed 13 people. When President Joe Biden replaced Trump in 2021, he became the first American president to publicly oppose the death penalty. He pledged to work with Congress to abolish the federal death penalty and called on those on death row to instead serve life sentences without the possibility of parole.
But for the past four years, Biden has done just that has made no attempt to gain support for legislation to abolish the death penalty that has languished in Congress. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has pursued new death sentences and aggressively defended existing ones — including cases involving the same issues the Biden administration has cited as reasons to end the practice. As it stands now, there are 40 people on federal death row.Many of them have exhausted their appeal options and may be executed by the new Trump administration, which, according to the right-wing policy document Project 2025plans to execute every death row inmate.
With the stroke of a pen, Biden could commute any federal death sentence to life in prison and stop the new Trump administration from implementing its policies. declared mass murder agenda. Now in his final weeks as president, Biden faces growing calls from lawmakers, activists, religious leaders and those on death row to take action before it’s too late. Even relatives of some victims, former corrections officers, prosecutors and retired judges have urged the president to clear federal death row.
“If I was lucky enough to be able to advise [Biden]I would like to tell him that it is completely in line with respect for the ministry [of Justice] for him to take another look at those decisions and make a statement about what it means to let the state kill people,” said Rachel Barkow, professor at New York University School of Law and former member of the US Sentencing Commission . in an interview.
“I have no doubt how history will judge the death penalty,” Barkow said.
Although Biden recently announced the politically charged decision to pardon his son Hunter Biden — who faced possible prison time for federal felony gun and tax convictions — he has given no indication of his willingness to extend mercy to those who might be executed. The White House cited the new Trump administration’s desire for “retaliation” as justification for Biden’s decision to intervene in Hunter Biden’s case. Aside from his son, the president’s end-of-office pardons have so far been limited to nearly 1,500 people already released into home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 39 people convicted of nonviolent crimes.
When Biden first took office, abolitionist advocates called on the president to quickly use his clemency power to clear death row as a fail-safe for congressional inaction. “If you don’t shuttle the entire line, this could happen again,” said former public defender and Wren Collective founder Jessica Brand. told HuffPost in January 2021, referring to the then-recent wave of executions under Trump. “Anyone who was even remotely outraged by how horrific and barbaric this has been should simply leave the line.”
Instead, the Biden administration made a decision careful, step-by-step approach. The Justice Department has reinstated the moratorium on federal executions — a return to the status quo before Trump’s first presidency — and has begun a review of the government’s execution protocol and regulations. The results of those reviews have not been released and the DOJ declined to comment on whether they would be completed before Biden leaves office on January 20.
At the same time, Justice Department lawyers continued to fight to uphold existing death sentences, a seemingly contradictory effort to achieve Biden’s stated goal of ending the federal death penalty. When defense attorneys have attempted to present evidence that their client has an intellectual disability that would make him or her ineligible for a death sentence, DOJ attorneys have cited procedural issues to prevent them from presenting that evidence in court, says Ruth Friedman, the director of the Federal Public Service. Capital Habeas Project, said in an interview. They also prevented people on death row from proving that they had ineffective trial lawyers or that their trials were tainted by racist practices.
“There’s a point where, what does it mean to say you care about these things, that you’re really concerned about the way federal death row is being implemented and people are still being executed,” Friedman said.
Last year, the Justice Department updated its Justice Manual to include specifications on when the death penalty should be sought. The changes raised the bar for capital murder searches and directed the government to consider the strength of the evidence, whether the suspect was already serving a lengthy sentence and the federal government’s interest in the case. “In assessing whether to pursue the death penalty, particular attention should be paid to cases that cause the most harm to the nation, including through their widespread impact on the community,” the revised manual said.
The updated guidelines would have barred most people currently on federal death row from prosecution as death penalty cases had the guidelines been in effect at the time of their trials, multiple attorneys noted in interviews.
“The Biden administration is saying, ‘We recognize that we don’t meet the standards that we think are narrow enough to impose the ultimate sanction — but we will allow them to be executed anyway,’” Friedman said. “That makes no sense. This is another reason why leniency is warranted.”
When Biden took office in 2021, Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) had already done so reintroduced legislation to abolish the federal death penalty that had stalled in the previous Congress. But even with Democrats keeping a close eye on both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the bill failed to gain traction. Fewer than half of Democrats in each chamber signed on to co-sponsor versions of legislation to abolish the death penalty introducedin2021 And againin2023.
“I wouldn’t say the White House has actively engaged people to support the bill,” Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), the sponsor of one of the death penalty bills in the House of Representatives, said. told HuffPost earlier this year. “I think their response to the death penalty issue was to implement this moratorium.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
As Trump’s second term approaches, Democrats have become increasingly outspoken in calling on Biden to commute the sentences of those on federal death row.
“The Biden administration has suspended federal executions because they do not create safer communities and it is impossible to ignore the number of people exonerated from death row due to racial bias, mental illness or inadequate defense,” said Senator Peter Welch ( D-Vt.), a former public defender, told HuffPost in a statement.
“The president has the unique power to commute federal death sentences to life in prison, and he can do so before January 20. President Biden must act quickly,” Welch said.
On Tuesday, Pressley, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and death penalty advocates held a rally press conference on Capitol Hill and called on Biden to commute death row sentences. “State-sanctioned murder is not justice, and the death penalty is a cruel, racist and fundamentally flawed punishment that has no place in our society,” Pressley said.
The lawmakers were joined by the Rev. Sharon Risher, whose mother and two cousins were killed in the 2015 mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In an interview, Risher acknowledged her own complex emotions surrounding the attempt to save the life of the person who killed her loved ones.
“I do not believe in the death penalty from a religious-philosophical point of view. But if there was a way for him to escape this earth without being killed by the state, as my mother’s child, I would be the first in line. But that is not the reality,” Risher told HuffPost. ‘I can’t choose who to forgive. That’s not my job. It is my job to ensure that everyone gets a fair chance. That’s why with Dylann Roof – even for him, even for him – I wouldn’t want the federal government to kill him.”
