President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row today, declining to commute the sentences of Robert D. Bowers, convicted of killing 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018; Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who, with his brother, killed three people and injured more than a dozen others at the 2013 Boston Marathon.
“To spare them all would have been an act of grace by our President. To spare some, to pick and choose who will live and who will die, is an act of crass calculus by a politician,” said DPF Board President Mike Farrell.
This decision marks the most federal death sentences commuted by any U.S. President in history. However, it falls short of fulfilling President Biden’s 2020 promise to end the death penalty at the federal level. While we are grateful to the President for saving the lives of 37 men, we are mindful of the reality that the three men whose sentences were not commuted are all but certain to be executed during the upcoming Trump administration. In the last six months of his first term, Trump authorized the execution of 13 people after a 17-year hiatus at the federal level. Trump has reaffirmed his intention to resume executions and expand the federal death penalty to include non-capital crimes.
“Should we accept that saving some is better than none? That is where he leaves us by choosing politics rather than grace,” said Farrell.