On December 23, US President Joe Biden commuted thirty-seven death sentences, less than a month before Donald Trump, a great supporter of capital punishment, returned to the White House.
All the beneficiaries of the measure had been sentenced to death by federal justice, which is distinct from that of individual states.
At the beginning of December, more than 130 organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Amnesty International, had reminded Biden of the promises made during the 2020 election campaign and underlined the risk of “a wave of executions” after Trump's inauguration.
“I commute the death sentences of thirty-seven of the forty persons on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole,” Biden said in a statement.
The president underlined that the provision “is in line with the moratorium desired by the current administration on federal executions, with the exclusion of terrorist crimes and mass murders motivated by hatred”.
“Let me be clear: I condemn the murders and mourn the victims, but I am more convinced than ever that the death penalty must be abolished at the federal level,” he added.
The three death row inmates who did not benefit from the provision are Djokhar Tsarnaev, perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine African Americans in a church in Charleston in 2015, and Robert Bowers, who killed nine people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
The last federal executions date back to the Trump presidency. After a seventeen-year hiatus, thirteen people had been executed between July 14, 2020, and January 16, 2021, the highest figure for a U.S. presidency in 120 years.
Capital punishment has been abolished in twenty-three of the country's fifty states. Moratoriums are in effect in six other states: Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
Twenty-five executions have been carried out in the United States in 2024, all at the state level.
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