President Biden on Monday will commute the sentences of nearly all of the 40 murderers on the federal government’s death row, in another move to thwart President-elect Donald Trump’s stated goals.
Under Mr. Biden’s order 37 of the 40 men on federal death row — all of whom had been convicted of murder — would have their sentences reduced to life imprisonment without parole.
The move, which is not reviewable by courts or reversible by the next president, would prevent Mr. Trump from repeating his first-term performance, when he carried out a record number of federal executions.
The move grants clemency to a rogues gallery of notorious killers, including five men who murdered children, nine who slaughtered their fellow inmates, and one who killed a prison guard with a hammer while serving a life sentence for murdering his U.S. Marine wife.
Among those whose sentences will be reduced are Kaboni Savage, who was convicted of committing or ordering the deaths of 12 people, including four children as he tried to expand his Philadelphia drug empire, and Thomas Sanders, who kidnapped and shot 12-year-old Lexis Roberts four times and cut her throat — after murdering her mother.
Others who will receive clemency are Iouri Mikhel, who was convicted of murdering five Russian and Georgian immigrants after kidnapping them for ransom and Jorge Avila-Torrez, a serial rapist who murdered two girls — aged 8 and 9 years old — and then slaughtered a female Naval officer four years later.
The three men whom Mr. Biden did not reprieve probably are the three highest-profile cases under the federal purview.
Robert Bowers killed 11 people in 2018 during a mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh; Dylann Roof massacred nine Black parishioners in a racist attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev bombed the Boston Marathon with his brother in 2013.
The White House said Mr. Biden did not grant those three killers clemency because their actions were “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”
The commutations do not cover the four inmates who sit on the U.S. military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Several al Qaeda terrorists also are being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on potential capital charges in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In a pending case, the Justice Department is seeking the death penalty for Payton Gendron, who is awaiting trial for the 2022 mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
It’s unclear whether Mr. Biden’s decision will impact the case of Gendron, who is already serving a life term after pleading to state murder charges. New York does not have the death penalty.
The vast majority of the killers awaiting execution in the U.S. are held on the states’ death rows, not in federal prisons. As of Oct. 1, the U.S. had a total of 2,180 inmates on states’ death row, according to data from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Mr. Biden said explicitly that he is commuting the sentences in order to stop Mr. Trump.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for their victims of their despicable acts and ache for all families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.
“But guided by conscience and my experience … I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted,” he said.
The Democratic Party platform in 2024 did not call for the abolition of the federal death penalty, though it had when Mr. Biden was the presidential nominee in 2020 and before that in 2016.
Mr. Biden is no stranger to controversial pardons. He issued a blanket pardon for his son Hunter Biden three weeks ago. The first son was convicted of three federal gun crimes and pleaded guilty to failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes.
On Dec. 12, the outgoing president commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people, including a woman who killed two of her ex-husbands and another lover; a woman who stole $54 million from a small town in Illinois; and a Pennsylvania judge who sentenced minors to harsh prison sentences for petty crimes in exchange for kickbacks from the prison operators.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who oversees federal prisons and sentencing, had recommended that Mr. Biden commute all but three individuals on federal death row, Justice Department sources said.
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment Sunday evening.
Earlier this month, a coalition of federal and state prosecutors, judges, religious leaders and law enforcement issues sent a series of letters to Mr. Biden urging him to commute the sentences of dozens of death row inmates ahead of the Trump administration.
Mr. Trump had vowed to end the moratorium on executions. When Mr. Biden came into office in 2021, one of his first actions was to pause federal executions.
The coalition had called for Mr. Biden to commute their sentences to life without parole, calling the death penalty barbaric, racist, immoral and outdated.
“The federal death penalty represents a profound failure of our justice system, riddled with inequities and errors that undermine its legitimacy. By commuting the sentences of those on federal death row, President Biden can take decisive action to prevent this deeply flawed system from inflicting further harm,” wrote Bryan Porter, commonwealth’s attorney for Alexandria, Virginia.
The groups, which included a coalition of 200 Black religious leaders, a group of 29 retired corrections officers, 100 business leaders, and a group of 166 family members of homicide victims said Mr. Biden needed to act quickly before Mr. Trump takes power.
During the last six months of Mr. Trump’s first term, a record 13 federal inmates were executed. Before Mr. Trump resumed executions, the federal government had not put anyone to death in 17 years.
The last federal inmate to be executed was Dustin John Higgs on Jan. 16, 2021, four days before Mr. Biden’s inauguration. He was executed for the 1996 murders of three women on federal land in Maryland.
The first Trump administration approved the use of pentobarbital in lethal injections over the objections of death penalty opponents who said it causes pain before death.
“The president-elect has a sordid history of executions and has stated his intention to expand and expedite them when he returns to office, making this an urgent national moment,” said Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, Catholic Mobilizing Network executive director.
“The clock is ticking for 40 lives. President Biden should exercise his constitutional authority now to offer clemency to each person on federal death row,” she said.
Pope Francis earlier this month prayed for the commutation of America’s condemned inmates during his weekly address. Mr. Biden, who is Catholic, spoke with Francis on Thursday and will meet with him at the Vatican next month, the White House already had announced.
Republicans, meanwhile, accused Mr. Biden of trying to appease his progressive base at the expense of murder victims’ families.
“It would mean that progressive politics is more important to the president than the lives taken by these murderers,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, said Wednesday while denouncing the eventually successful progressive pressure campaign on Mr. Biden.
