US President Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people serving at the federal level Death row in his weeks in office leading up to President-elect Donald Trump’s second term.
The move, announced Monday, means the 37 people will instead face life in prison as a result of their conviction, according to the White House. Three other inmates convicted of deadly hate or “terrorism” crimes still face execution.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, mourn the victims of their heinous acts, and mourn all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said in a statement.
“But guided by my conscience and experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vice president and now president, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of… capital punishment at the federal level,” he said.
The announcement comes just weeks before Trump takes office. The president-elect, whose first four-year term ended in 2021, has regularly called for the death penalty for undocumented immigrants who kill U.S. citizens.
During his first term, he oversaw the execution of 13 federal prisoners – the most under any president in the last 120 years.
Biden, who defeated Trump in the 2020 election, campaigned as an opponent of the death penalty. When he took office, his administration placed a moratorium on most federal executions.
“These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my administration has placed on federal executions in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder,” Biden said in the statement.
Three inmates will remain on federal death row.
This includes Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – who helped carry it out Boston Marathon bombing which claimed three lives in 2013 – and Dylan Roof — a white supremacist who shot and killed nine black churchgoers in a racist attack in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Robert Bowerswho killed 11 Jewish worshipers in a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 still faces execution.
Nine people convicted of murdering fellow inmates, four people convicted of murder in bank robberies and one who killed a prison guard were among those whose sentences were commuted.
Also there was Billie Jerome Allen, who was convicted in 1998 at age 19 of killing a security guard during a robbery in Missouri.
The case has long attracted attention because, according to Amnesty International, there are “serious concerns about racial bias, his young age at the time and the lack of evidence linking him to the crime.”
“Cruel, inhumane and degrading punishment”
Biden’s announcement follows urging from several human rights groups who pointed to Trump’s rhetoric and history regarding federal executions.
There have been no federal executions since Trump took office in 2003. The last federal execution in the United States took place on January 16, 2021, four days before Trump left the White House.
In a statement, Amnesty International USA Executive Director Paul O’Brien welcomed Biden’s move but said he needed to go further.
“The death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhumane and degrading punishment, and President Biden’s eleventh-hour decision before leaving office to commute these death sentences is a great moment for human rights,” O’Brien said.
“The president’s decision is a significant step toward his 2020 promise to abolish the federal death penalty and incentivize states to follow suit,” he said.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states. Six other states – Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Tennessee – have moratoriums in place.
In 2024 there were 25 Executions in the USA at the state level.
