Sen. Joe Manchin III blasted President Biden’s decision to commute the sentence of dozens of death row inmates, two of which were convicted of murder in the senator’s home state of West Virginia.
Mr. Manchin took issue with Mr. Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of Brandon Basham and Chadrick Fulks, who were convicted of slaying Marshall University student Samantha Burns two decades ago in a crime spree that also included the murder of a woman in South Carolina.
“After speaking to Samantha Burns’ parents, I believe it is my duty to speak on their behalf and say President Biden’s decision to commute the death sentences for the two men convicted in her brutal murder is horribly misguided and insulting,” Mr. Manchin, a Democrat-turned-independent who is now retiring from the Senate, said on social media.
“Particularly since Samantha’s family wrote letters to President Biden & the Department of Justice, pleading for them not to do this, but their concerns were unheard,” he continued. “I can’t imagine the grief that Kandi and John Burns are reliving and dealing with during the holiday season.”
Mr. Biden used his executive authority in the waning days of his presidency to reduce the sentences of Basham and Fulks, along with 35 other federal death row inmates, to life imprisonment.
The outgoing president said that he commuted the sentences of the death row inmates, all of whom were convicted of murder, to stop President-elect Donald Trump from restarting executions paused by Mr. Biden.
Mr. Biden left only three inmates on death row: the Boston Marathon bomber who killed three and wounded hundreds, the gunman from the racially-motivated killings of nine people at a Charleston, South Carolina, church and the attacker who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
