Headlines from December 23, 2024

The president of the United States, Joe Biden, has spared the lives of 37 men sentenced to death at the federal level. This Monday morning, just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House, Biden commuted the sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Biden stated in a statement: “I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. “I cannot in good conscience stand by and allow a new government to resume the executions that I stopped.” Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, praised Biden's decision and said: “[La medida constituye] “an important turning point in ending the tragic and error-prone use of the death penalty in the United States.”

Biden did not commute the sentences of three other men sentenced to death at the federal level: Dylann Roof, the attacker who in 2015 killed nine black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in the city of Charleston, South Carolina; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the perpetrator of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; and Robert Bowers, who in 2018 killed eleven parishioners who were at the Tree of Life synagogue in the city of Pittsburgh, in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in United States history.