Dn the last six months of 2020, at the end of which Donald Trump was forced to hand over power to Joe Biden, thirteen death sentences were carried out in federal prisons, before the new president was able to take the oath of office.
It is by referring to this frenzy of executions, initiated by an outgoing president and unprecedented in American judicial history, that human rights defenders, men of the Church, lawyers, magistrates, and even families of victims wrote to President Joe Biden. Everyone is asking him to pardon the 40 prisoners who are on death row in federal prisons before he leaves the White House.
A broken commitment
Biden would not have needed to make this decision if, as he had committed to during his 2020 electoral campaign, he had passed a law abolishing capital punishment. But he did not have the chance, like François Mitterrand in the past, to have with him to convince him to act an eloquent and determined supporter of the abolition of the death penalty, like Robert Badinter.
So Biden, the convinced Catholic, chose a sort of “at the same time” which puts him in an uncomfortable position today. Although he did not authorize any capital executions during his mandate, he did, however, approve the indictments of federal prosecutors demanding the death penalty when it seemed justified to them.
The difficulty for Biden, on the eve of the transfer of power, is to decide whether he pardons all those sentenced to death or whether he does it on a case-by-case basis, depending on the seriousness of the facts for which the inmates were convicted. Indeed, there are currently on death row those responsible for murders or killings to whom it is difficult to grant a presidential pardon individually, whereas a law applying indiscriminately to all would have aroused fewer cases of conscience. for the one who has to make the decision.
Among those threatened with the death penalty is, for example, Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who, on June 17, 2015, killed nine African-Americans in an Episcopalian church in Charleston. And also Djokhar Tsarnaev, the Chechen who, with his brother, placed a bomb at the finish of the Boston marathon on April 15, 2013, the explosion of which left 3 dead and 260 injured. Or Robert Bowers, author of the worst anti-Semitic attack in the history of the United States who, on October 27, 2018, left 11 people dead in a Pittsburgh synagogue. So many criminals who were tried while Joe Biden was vice-president or president.
Last Western democracy to apply the death penalty
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
A decision to pardon such acts, investigated and condemned by the courts according to existing legislation, is not obvious. Even when we are aware, like President Biden, of the abnormal position of the United States, the last Western democracy to still apply the death penalty.
A situation which, due to the American federal system and the independence of the judiciary of each state, in relation to Washington, will be difficult to change. If there are only 40 people on death row in federal prisons, there are 2,100 on state death rows. Even if this figure no longer means much, because it concerns many prisoners who have been sentenced for a long time and detained in states which have decided on moratoriums on capital executions. Despite everything, there are still nine American states that routinely practice the death penalty. Most are from Southern states. But all of them, except Arizona, were won by Trump on November 5. He who, a determined supporter of the death penalty, had resumed, during his first mandate, federal executions, suspended for 17 years by his predecessors.
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