Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of dozens of inmates on Death Row in the last leg of his presidency by reducing their penalty to life in prison without parole – except for three.
The US president has commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 federal death row inmates by switching their sentences from death to life in prison without parole.
Among those spared are nine people who were convicted of murdering fellow prisoners, and four who killed during bank robberies and drug deals.
Another person has been liberated from the death penalty after killing a prison guard.
Len Davis, who was a New Orleans police officer at the time he operated a drug ring and arranged a woman’s murder, is also among those who have been shown clemency.
Biden said: “Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss.”
In a statement, Biden said he was ‘more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level’ as he continues to oppose the measure.
His decision comes weeks before pro-capital punishment President-elect, Donald Trump, is due to take over the White House in January.
Trump had resumed federal executions when he was in office, and saw as many as 13 deaths by lethal injection carried out in his last six months in power.
There had been no federal inmates put to death in the States since 2003 until Trump picked up executions in July 2020 – and indicated during his re-election campaign that he would expand the halls of death row to include human and drug traffickers and migrants who kill American citizens.
This was apparently at the forefront of Biden’s mind when he made the move today (Monday, December 23) as clemency decisions cannot be reversed by a president’s successor.
The president added he could not ‘in good conscience – stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted’.
But what about the three remaining who still face execution?
Biden couldn’t bring himself to commute the sentence of the ‘Boston Marathon bomber’, then 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to death for killing three and injuring 264 people when he detonated a paid of homemade pressure-cooked bombs at the finish line to the race in 2013.
White supremacist Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine Black church congregants in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 in a racially motivated attack, is also firmly sat on death row.
Jurors at the time convicted the then 22-year-old of obstructing the exercise of religion and federal hate crimes.
Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 Jewish worshippers during a mass shooting in 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, is also standing to face lethal injection.
Bowers was shouting ‘all Jews must die’ as he opened fire at worshippers gathered at the synagogue, and was later found to have fuelled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories online.
Biden’s decision will not make a difference to the estimated 2,250 inmates sentenced to death in state courts, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre, but comes as the President earlier commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoned 39 convicted of non-violent crimes, including his own son, Hunter Biden, who was facing two criminal cases.
Hunter had pleaded guilty to tax charges earlier in September, and was found guilty of being an illegal drug user in possession of a gun in June.
This made him the first child of a sitting president to be a convicted of a crime.
