Questioned by human rights organizations, American President Joe Biden finally commuted the sentences of 37 death row inmates on Monday, less than a month before the return to the White House of Donald Trump, a supporter of capital punishment.
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The individuals concerned had all been convicted by American federal justice, distinct from state justice.
At the beginning of December, more than 130 organizations, including the powerful civil rights group ACLU or Amnesty International United States, reminded Joe Biden of his 2020 campaign commitment against the death penalty and welcomed the moratorium on executions at the level of federal justice decreed in May 2021 by his government.
The organizations had said they feared a “wave of executions” after his successor Donald Trump took office.
“I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” Joe Biden announced in a statement.
The US president indicated that the commutations issued Monday were “consistent with the moratorium that (his) administration imposes on federal executions in cases other than terrorism and mass murders motivated by hatred”.
Nine of the individuals escaping the death penalty thanks to the Democratic president's measure were convicted of killing other prisoners. Four others committed murder during bank robberies and another killed a prison guard.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, I mourn the victims of their despicable acts, and I grieve for all the families who are suffering unimaginable and irreparable losses,” Joe Biden wrote.
“But, guided by my conscience and my experience (…) I am more convinced than ever that we must stop using the death penalty at the federal level,” he added.
Increased recourse under Trump
Among the three convicts not benefiting from this presidential measure are Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the bombers of the attack against the Boston marathon on April 15, 2013, and Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine African-Americans in a church in Charleston in 2015.
Robert Bowers, perpetrator of an armed attack at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 that killed 11 Jewish people, will also remain on death row.
Federal executions are rare, with the vast majority carried out by states. Some 2,300 prisoners are on death row in the United States and, until the commutation announced Monday, only 40 were there after a conviction by federal justice.
The last federal executions date back to the end of the Trump presidency. After a 17-year hiatus, 13 convicts were put to death between July 14, 2020 and January 16, 2021, the largest number under the mandate of an American president in some 120 years.
The last execution took place just four days before the inauguration of his Democratic successor Joe Biden.
Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to extend the use of capital punishment, so that it applies to immigrants who have killed American citizens as well as to drug traffickers and individuals practicing human trafficking. humans.
Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 of the country's 50 states. Moratoriums are also in effect in six other states, namely Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
Twenty-five executions took place in 2024 in the United States, all at the state justice level.
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