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    • Trump could speed up executions. Here’s how Biden could stop it.
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    Trump could speed up executions. Here’s how Biden could stop it.

    Pabio Posted on

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    It’s been almost 10 years since a white supremacist was welcomed into a South Carolina church and opened fire, killing nine people at a Bible study, including the Rev. Sharon Risher’s mother, his two cousins ​​and a childhood friend.

    When the shooter, Dylann Roof, was sentenced to death in 2017, Risher thought he deserved to die. Over time, she reconnected with her faith and found a way to forgive him. When she became aware of the broader issues surrounding the death penalty, such as racial disparities and the lack of evidence that it deters violent crime, Risher helped launch a campaign to save not only Roof’s life, but the lives of all men on federal death row, including high-profile inmates like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of Boston Marathon bombing and Robert Bowers, the man sentenced to death for the 2018 mass shooting in Synagogue of the Tree of Life in Pittsburgh.

    Risher, who serves on the board of Death Penalty Action, hand-delivered a letter to the White House in June urging President Joe Biden to commute his sentences — but received no response. The nonprofit she represents sent another letter signed by 350 organizations after former President Donald Trump won the November election. They did not receive a response. His group plans to send a fourth letter next month as the deadline for Biden to grant clemency runs out.

    Opponents like Risher hope to secure life sentences for these prisoners since the former reality TV star helped speed up 13 executions in the final six months of his first term. No federal executions have taken place during Biden’s presidency, which ends January 20, 2025.

    “We are concerned that if Biden doesn’t intervene, this will happen again,” Risher said.

    Death Penalty Action is among hundreds of advocacy groups pressuring Biden to keep a promise he made on the campaign trail to end the federal death penalty and prevent Trump from launching another series of executions. They pleaded with Biden through letters, petitions and protests to commute the sentences of the 40 men on federal death row. (The last woman on federal death row was executed eight days before Trump left office.) There is precedent at the state and federal level for mass 11-hour commutations, but given Biden’s record in When it comes to clemency, it is unclear whether he will take any action.

    “He can absolutely commute all of these sentences,” said Rachel Barkow, a law professor at New York University who has written on presidential clemency. “I just don’t know if he will.”

    Executions on the rise Deadliest year in a decade for executions worldwide; The United States among the top 5 countries

    The Trump administration’s unprecedented series of executions

    Trump took a hardline stance on the death penalty the last time he was in office. Attorney General William Barr said after the first executions were scheduled for 2019, “the Department of Justice upholds the rule of law – and we have a duty to victims and their families to uphold the punishment imposed by our justice system.”

    The Trump administration was first to apply the federal death penalty in 17 years, overseeing 13 executions, part of an unprecedented series that continued despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inmates included Daniel Lewis Leethe first prisoner executed by the federal government since 2003, and Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on death row and the first woman executed in almost 70 years.

    During his election campaign, Trump called for increased use of the death penalty to punish. drug traffickershuman traffickers, child rapists And migrants who kill American citizens or law enforcement officers. Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment on his policies for the next term.

    In 2008, the Supreme Court struck a Louisiana law that allows the death penalty for child sexual abuse, citing a national consensus that capital punishment should be reserved for the worst offenses.

    The vast majority of federal death penalty offenses involve murder. The exceptions are crimes such as espionage and treason, according to Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. To expand the list of eligible crimes, Trump would need congressional approval.

    “Some of his proposals are legally dubious to say the least, and I think any effort to expand the death penalty beyond its current limits will face challenges,” Maher said.

    What the new Trump administration means for you: Register for USA TODAY’s On Politics newsletter.

    Biden is constantly ‘inconsistent’ on capital punishment

    Biden promised on his campaign website, he would push for legislation abolishing the federal death penalty and encourage states to do the same. He then became the first president to oppose the death penalty.

    But Biden has done little to make the case for Invoice introduced by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-MA, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, to end the federal death penalty, said Austin Sarat, professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.

    “The record is mixed,” Sarat said, emphasizing that “the rhetoric was very good, but so far the record does not live up to the rhetoric.”

    Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021, taking the death penalty off the table in more than two dozen death penalty cases in which the Trump administration had authorized it.

    The federal system has many of the systemic problems found at the state level, according to a report from the Death Penalty Information Center. Since 1989, nearly 75 percent of defendants allowed to face federal death penalty proceedings have been people of color, and federal capital trials are more likely to have all-white or almost all-white juries. whites.

    But federal prosecutors continued to oppose death row inmates’ appeals and sought new death sentences in a handful of cases, including for Arbors And the man who killed 10 black people during a racist massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in 2022.

    Attorney Terry Connors, who represents many Buffalo victims in a lawsuit, told local media Not all of his clients felt the same way about the shooter facing execution.

    “There was a split,” Connors told Spectrum News. “Many of them thought life in prison was the appropriate sentence. Let him stay there and experience that. And others thought the maximum sentence was appropriate in this case. And if not was not the case, in which case?”

    Sarat, of Amherst, noted that retaining the death penalty in some cases was Garland’s decision, and that Biden may not have wanted to interfere with the Justice Department’s independence.

    Still, Sarat said, “The only thing consistent about Biden’s record on the death penalty is his inconsistency. »

    Last minute reprieves are not unusual

    Issuing a series of commutations, including for people on death row, before an executive leaves office is “very common,” according to NYU’s Barkow.

    Several governors have released their states’ death row, including Oregon Governor Kate Brown in 2022, Colorado Governor Jared Polis in 2020, Illinois Governor George Ryan in 2003 and New Mexico Governor Toney Anaya in 1986.

    At the federal level, death row pardons date back to the country’s founding, when President George Washington pardoned two people sentenced to death for their role in the Whiskey Rebellion. In the modern era, President Barack Obama granted clemency to an intellectually disabled federal death row inmate and commuted the death sentence of someone on military death row, according to Maher of the Death Penalty Information Center.

    “It wouldn’t be unprecedented for him to do something like that,” Maher said of Biden.

    The United States has executed 21 men this year A look at the state of the death penalty

    So what will Biden do?

    The White House did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment on Biden’s plans for federal death sentences.

    Although Biden did not respond to his group’s petition, Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of the Catholic Mobilizing Network, said she hoped that as a fellow Catholic, Biden would act.

    “I just hope and pray that he sees this opportunity to use his constitutional authority and align himself with something really important in light of his religious tradition,” Murphy said.

    Sarat, of Amherst, said there are a multitude of problems Biden pledged to address before leaving office. The president is aware that support for the death penalty has fell to lowest level in decadesdeclared Sarat and he knows it: “We are in a moment of national reconsideration of capital punishment”.

    “Biden has more policy space to do a mass switch than one might think,” he said.

    Biden issued federal pardons to marijuana users and veterans convicted under law banning same-sex sexbut its overall pardon rate is low, according to Barkow, at NYU. “It was mediocre. Personally, I would probably give it a D,” she said.

    At the end of a 50-year political career, Biden is probably thinking about how he wants to be remembered, Barkow said. Using the power only he has to propose a blanket commutation would demonstrate his moral opposition to the death penalty as a whole, rather than making a statement about a specific case, she said.

    “Switching the entire death row to life without parole, as a statement against the death penalty, would be a truly bold legacy move,” Barkow said.

    Contributor: Reuters

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