United States: Joe Biden pardons 37 death row inmates before Donald Trump returns to power

It was a campaign commitment. Outgoing US President Joe Biden announced this Monday that he had commuted the sentences of 37 death row inmates, less than a month before the return to the White House of Donald Trump, a supporter of capital punishment. “I commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.“, announced Joe Biden in a press release.

At the beginning of December, more than 130 organizations, including the powerful civil rights group Aclu and 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.

Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, I mourn the victims of their vile acts.

Joe Biden

According to Joe Biden, these commutations were “consistent with (his) government's moratorium on federal executions in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murders“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 vile acts, and I grieve for all the families who are suffering unimaginable and irreparable losses.“, wrote Joe Biden. “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. Twenty-five executions took place in 2024 in the United States, all at the state justice level.

2,300 prisoners on death row

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 in the hall of death.

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President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to expand the use of the death penalty to apply to immigrants who kill American citizens as well as drug traffickers and individuals engaged in trafficking. of human beings. 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.