President Biden Commutes Sentences of 37 Death Row Inmates, Leaving 3 Behind
President Biden announced on Monday that he will commute the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates, changing their sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The move has been met with praise from some and criticism from others, who question the president’s rationale for the decision.
The 37 inmates whose sentences will be commuted were found guilty of various crimes, including murder, kidnapping, and drug-related killings. The White House stated that President Biden believes “America must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level, except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”
Three inmates, however, will remain on death row: Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018; Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who worked with his brother to carry out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
John Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and former chief economist for the U.S. Sentencing Commission, questioned the president’s rationale for commuting some sentences but not others. “There were mass murderers that he commuted the sentence for, and yet there are other ones who killed fewer who he didn’t commute the sentence for,” Lott said. “When I read his statement, it wasn’t obvious to me what his rationale was for dividing the cases the way he did.”
Criminal justice reform advocates, on the other hand, praised the move. Matthew Mangino, author of “The Executioner’s Toll,” stated that Biden’s commutations strengthen the argument in favor of the death penalty. “In a strange sort of way, President Biden’s bold use of his clemency power to prevent the systematic execution of federal death row inmates, strengthens the argument for the death penalty,” Mangino said.
United Women in Faith, the largest denominational organization for women, called on Biden to commute the sentences of all 40 federal death-row inmates, citing the criminal justice system’s tendency to unfairly target people of color.
Lott also noted that death sentences often inspire criminals to plead guilty to their crimes in order to avoid death, thus allowing governments to avoid costly and emotionally taxing death-penalty trials. Economists have found that for every execution that occurs, there is a reduction in the number of murders by eight to 18, suggesting that the death penalty serves as a deterrent for criminals.
