US President Joe Biden on Monday pardoned the death sentences of 37 of the 40 federal prisoners, acting ahead of the return of Donald Trump, who carried out a large number of lethal injections during his first term.
With less than a month left in office, Biden faces growing calls from death penalty opponents to commute the sentences of people on death row to life in prison without parole, which Now 37 people will die.
The move leaves only a handful of high-profile killers motivated by hate or terrorism facing the federal death penalty – a moratorium for which has been in place under Biden.
“These loopholes are consistent with my administration’s moratorium on federal executions in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder,” Biden said in a statement.
“I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life without the possibility of parole,” he said.
The three inmates who remain on federal death row include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who helped carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and Dylann Roof, an avowed white supremacist who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. They were shot dead.
Robert Bowers, who killed 11 Jewish worshipers during the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, also remains on death row.
Those commuted included nine people convicted of murdering fellow prisoners, four convicted of murders committed during bank robberies and a man accused of killing a prison guard.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these killers, mourn for the victims of their despicable acts, and express my grief for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said.
He said, “But guided by my conscience and my experience…I am more convinced than ever that we must end the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
Trump extends death penalty
Biden campaigned for the White House as an opponent of the death penalty, and after his presidency the Justice Department banned its use at the federal level.
During his re-election campaign, Trump repeatedly talked about expanding the use of the death penalty to include immigrants who murder American citizens and drug and human traffickers.
No federal inmates had been put to death in the United States since 2003 until Trump resumed federal executions in July 2020.
During his last six months in power he oversaw the execution of 13 people by lethal injection, more than any American leader in 120 years.
The last federal execution – which took place by lethal injection at a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana – took place on January 16, 2021, four days before Trump left office.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while six others – Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Tennessee – have retained them.
In 2024, 25 executions have been carried out in the United States, all at the state level.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
