Biden commutes death sentences for 37 federal inmates before Trump takes office

With four weeks left in office, President Joe Biden announced on Monday that he was commuting the death sentences of 37 of the 40 inmates sitting on the federal death row. They will now serve life sentences without the possibility of parole. The decision comes as Biden moves to forestall what he expects will be Donald Trump's aggressive resumption of capital punishment once he takes the oath of office in January. For weeks, abolition groups, civil rights organizations, religious leaders—including Pope Francis—and families of victims had pressed Biden to act. He had campaigned on ending federal capital punishment in 2020 but could not deliver during his presidency due to congressional opposition. What he did manage was to impose a moratorium on federal executions through the Justice Department, halting a practice that had been dormant for 17 years before Trump's first term.

"I am more convinced than ever that we must end the use of capital punishment at the federal level," Biden said in a statement released Monday. "In good conscience, I cannot stand by and allow a new administration to resume executions that I have stopped." The statement also acknowledged the weight of his decision. "Make no mistake," he wrote. "I condemn these murderers. I stand with the victims of their despicable acts and grieve for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss."

The 37 inmates whose sentences were commuted had all been convicted of murder; nine of them killed other people while incarcerated in the federal system. All were housed in the death row unit at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. This represents a small fraction of the nation's condemned: as of October, roughly 2,180 people were awaiting execution across the country, including 49 women. Capital punishment exists in 27 of the 50 states, but certain crimes—those that cross state lines or are deemed to affect the nation as a whole—fall under federal jurisdiction, where the death penalty also applies.

Three men were excluded from Biden's clemency: Robert D. Bowers, 52, who killed 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; Dylan Roof, 30, a white supremacist who murdered nine people at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31, one of two brothers who carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and wounded a dozen more. These cases, marked by mass casualties and national attention, remained outside the scope of Biden's action.

The White House framed the commutations as part of Biden's broader criminal justice reform record. In early December, he had pardoned approximately 1,500 people in a single day—a historical record. He became the first president to issue categorical pardons for people convicted solely of marijuana possession and for LGBTQ+ military veterans convicted under now-repealed laws criminalizing private conduct. Yet the statement notably avoided mention of Biden's pardon of his son Hunter, a decision that contradicted his repeated promises not to use presidential powers to benefit family members.

Trump has made clear his intention to expand capital punishment. He supports applying the death penalty to drug traffickers, human traffickers, and child abusers—categories far broader than current federal law allows. During the final months of his first term, he ended the 17-year hiatus on federal executions, overseeing 13 executions at Terre Haute between July 2020 and January 2021. Trump's return to office signals a sharp reversal of Biden's approach.

Support for capital punishment in the United States has declined to its lowest point in five decades, according to an October Gallup poll, though 53 percent of Americans still favor it. Among those aged 18 to 43, the majority oppose it. Public backing peaked in 1994 at 80 percent. States that retain capital punishment have begun experimenting with nitrogen asphyxiation and firing squads as alternatives to lethal injection, driven by pharmaceutical companies' refusal to supply execution drugs and the European Union's 2011 ban on exporting them to the United States. Since the nation reintroduced capital punishment in 1982, approximately 1,600 people have been executed.

Martin Luther King III, a prominent death penalty abolitionist, praised Biden's action as something "no president before him was willing to do: take meaningful and lasting action not only to acknowledge the racist roots of capital punishment but also to remedy its persistent injustice." Donnie Oliverio, a retired Ohio police officer whose partner was killed by one of the men whose death sentence was commuted, offered a different perspective rooted in faith. He said that executing his "best friend's" killer would not have brought him peace. "The president has done the right thing," Oliverio stated, "and what is consistent with the Catholic faith that he and I share."