WASHINGTON – Responding to mounting pressure from criminal justice reform advocates, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden announced Monday he’s approving commutations for 37 of 40 federal death row prisoners from death to life without the possibility of parole.
The announcement comes after advocates as high-profile as Martin Luther King III lobbied for Biden to expand commutations beyond that of his own son, Hunter Biden. The surprise announcement also comes just weeks after 2024 Republican President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office as a strong supporter of the death penalty.
“I’ve dedicated my career to reducing violent crime and ensuring a fair and effective justice system,” Biden said in a White House statement.
A white supremacist, an antisemite, and an American terrorist remain on federal death row
The move means just three federal death row prisoners remain eligible for execution: 30-year-old Dylann Roof, the white supremacist mass shooter who massacred nine Christian worshippers inside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, 31-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnae, the American terrorist who detonated a bomb during the Boston Marathon in 2013, and 51-year-old Robert Bowers, an antisemitic Pennsylvania man who massacred 11 Jewish congregants inside the Tree of life Synagogue in 2018.
“I applaud President Biden’s step today in addressing the racism that infects the death penalty and the criminal legal system as a whole,” CEO Jamila Hodge of Equal Justice USA said in a statement shared with The Black Wall Street Times. “It is one flaw of many that have hollowed out the principles of justice in America and exposed the death penalty for its many failures.”
Biden commutations limit Trump’s options to kill
For decades, even after a 1972 Supreme Court decision that halted executions nationwide due to its unequal and arbitrary use, advocates have called out continued inequalities and errors in its enforcement.
Ultimately, Biden has pardoned 39 people and enacted over 1,500 commutations in what has become the largest amount of commutations of any U.S. president in history. Meanwhile, Donald Trump spent his first term doubling down on the death penalty.
Aside from leaving the White House with two impeachments in 2020, Trump also oversaw the executions of 13 federal prisoners, the most of any president in modern U.S. history.
Federal Bureau of Prisons/Community Federal Defender Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania via AP
The outgoing president failed to deliver on his promise to end the federal death penalty. Yet Biden’s commutations of 37 of 40 prisoners severely limits Trump’s ability to enact another execution spree.
Oklahoma the last state to kill in 2024
Notably, on the state level executions have severely dropped compared to previous decades. Only nine states carried out executions in 2024, according to the Death Penalty Info Center. They include: Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, Utah, Florida, South Carolina and Indiana.
Oklahoma was the last state to carry out an execution this year, days before Christmas. As the only state in which a majority of voters from all 77 counties chose Trump in three national elections, many Oklahomans support Trump’s vociferous use of the death penalty. With one of his final acts, however, Biden has severely limited Trump’s ability to continue executions on the federal level.
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