Outgoing US President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 sentenced to death by federal justice, a “historic” decision demanded by human rights organizations who feared a wave of executions under Donald Trump.
This is “the largest number of death sentence commutations by an American president in modern times”, underline human rights organizations, mobilized for weeks to convince Joe Biden.
Federal death sentences and federal executions are rare, the vast majority emanating from the courts of each of the 50 states. The 25 executions carried out in the country in 2024 were also concentrated in nine states.
Some 2,300 prisoners are on death row in the United States, including only 40 sentenced by federal justice until the clemency measure taken by Joe Biden in favor of all, with the notable exception of three perpetrators. attacks which had shocked the country.
Biden’s “posterity”
Martin Luther King III, son of the leader of the civil rights movement, hailed “a historic day”. According to him, “President Biden has done what no president before him has been willing to do: act in a meaningful and lasting way to not only recognize the racist roots of the death penalty, but also address its continuing injustice “.
“With the stroke of a pen, the president ensures his posterity as a leader fighting for racial justice, humanity and morality,” also says Anthony Romero, director of the powerful civil rights organization ACLU, knowing thanks to a “historic and courageous” decision.
Nearly 40% of those sentenced to death by federal justice are black, while this community represents only 12% of the adult American population, said the NGO Southern Poverty Law Center, one of more than 130 organizations which had recalled the December 9 to Joe Biden his 2020 campaign pledge against capital punishment.
These organizations had warned of a “wave of executions” under Donald Trump, who will succeed him on January 20.
Amnesty International USA, another such organization, thanked Joe Biden for hearing them, but called on him to go even further by “commuting all federal and military death sentences.” There are four of these.
“We are grateful and relieved that the president exercised his constitutional power in a manner consistent with his faith,” said Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, director of a Catholic organization campaigning against capital punishment, referring to Joe Biden's Catholicism.
2021 federal moratorium
“I am today commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on death row in federal justice to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” Joe Biden announced in a press release.
He notably justified these commutations by a concern for consistency with the moratorium on federal executions decreed in May 2021 by his administration, with the exception of acts of “terrorism and killings motivated by hatred”.
Consequently, three people sentenced to death are excluded from this clemency measure.
They are Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the bombers of the attack on the Boston marathon on April 15, 2013, Dylann Roof, white supremacist murderer of nine African-Americans in a church in 2015 and Robert Bowers, author of an armed attack on a synagogue in 2018 that killed 11 people, the deadliest against Jews in U.S. history.
The Republican President of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, on the other hand denounced Joe Biden's decision in favor of 37 convicts, denouncing on X “a slap in the face for the families who have suffered immeasurably because of these animals”.
The last federal executions took place at the end of the Trump presidency. After 17 years of interruption, 13 convicts were put to death between July 14, 2020 and January 16, 2021, “more than the ten previous administrations combined”, recalled these organizations.
During his election campaign, the Republican candidate called for expanding the scope of the death penalty, particularly to immigrants convicted of murdering American citizens or drug and human traffickers.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 American states. Six others (Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee) observe a moratorium on executions.
