Donald Trump said Tuesday that upon his return to the White House, he would order his administration to seek the death penalty for more defendants, the day after Joe commuted the sentences of 37 death row inmates. Biden.
• Also read: United States: Biden commutes the sentences of 37 death row inmates
“As soon as I take office, I will direct the Department of Justice to vigorously seek the death penalty to protect American families and children from rapists, murderers, and violent monsters,” wrote the future American president on his Truth Social platform.
A little earlier, he had criticized the decision of his successor and now future predecessor, who on Monday commuted the sentences of 37 condemned to death by the American federal justice system, a few weeks before the transfer of power between the Democrat and the Republican.
“Joe Biden just commuted the death sentences of 37 of the worst killers in our country. When you hear what each person did, you won't believe he did this,” the Republican wrote on Truth Social.
“It doesn’t make any sense. Relatives and friends (of the victims) are even more devastated. They can’t believe what’s happening!” he added.
The Democrat's decision constituted the “largest number of death sentence commutations by an American president in modern times”, underlined human rights organizations, mobilized for weeks to convince Joe Biden.
They feared a wave of executions when Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20.
During his victorious campaign, Donald Trump had already called for extending the scope of the death penalty, in particular to immigrants convicted of murdering American citizens or to drug and human traffickers.
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 the organizations.
Of some 2,300 prisoners on death row in the United States, only 40 were sentenced by federal justice until the clemency measure taken by Joe Biden. The Democrat excluded three perpetrators of attacks from his measure, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the bombers of the attack on the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013.
