Donald Trump on Tuesday castigated Joe Biden's decision to commute the sentences of 37 death row inmates by American federal justice a few weeks before the transfer of power between the Democrat and the Republican, a fervent supporter of capital punishment.
• Also read: United States: Biden commutes the sentences of 37 death row inmates
“Joe Biden just commuted the death sentences of 37 of our country’s worst killers. When you hear the actions committed by everyone, you will not believe that he did this,” the Republican wrote on his Truth Social platform.
“It doesn’t make any sense. Relatives and friends [des victimes] are even more devastated. They can’t believe what’s happening!” he added.
Donald Trump was reacting to the announcement the day before of his successor and now future predecessor, who decided to commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 sentenced to death by federal justice.
This is “the largest number of death sentence commutations by an American president in modern times”, underlined human rights organizations, mobilized for weeks to convince Joe Biden. They feared a wave of executions when Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20.
Because the Republican is a fervent supporter of the death penalty.
During his victorious campaign, Donald Trump called for extending its scope, in particular to immigrants convicted of murdering American citizens or to drug and human traffickers.
The last federal executions took place at the end of the Trump presidency. After 17 years of interruption, 13 convicts were put to death between July 14, 2020 and January 16, 2021, i.e. “more than [lors d]“The 10 previous administrations combined,” recalled the organizations.
Of the approximately 2,300 prisoners on death row in the United States, only 40 were sentenced by federal justice. Joe Biden commuted all their sentences, however excluding from his measure three perpetrators of attacks, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the bombers of the attack against the Boston marathon on April 15, 2013.
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