A coalition of former prison officials, relatives of homicide victims, civil rights advocates and religious leaders is urging President Biden to empty federal death row before he cedes the White House to President-elect Trump, who staunchly supports capital punishment. Letters to Biden ask him to commute all federal death sentences to life without parole, invoking the president’s Catholic faith and public opposition to capital punishment, and criticizing the death penalty as arbitrary, unfair and biased, the Washington Post reports. “We need clear and lasting steps that will ensure that the next administration will not execute the people currently facing death sentences in the federal system,” said a collection of current and former prosecutors, police chiefs and attorneys general.
Forty people are on federal death row, including the gunman who killed nine Black parishioners in Charleston, S.C. , the surviving Boston Marathon bomber and the attacker who gunned down 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. All three were sentenced to death when Biden served as president or vice president. Others are far less prominent, including a person convicted of killing a fellow federal inmate and another convicted of robbing a bank with an associate who shot and killed a guard. Their attorneys told Biden in some cases that the victims’ relatives oppose executing the condemned and that their clients received poor legal counsel and had trials tainted with racial bias. If Biden commutes death sentences, he could anger supporters of capital punishment. Commutations — unlike executive orders or regulations that can be rescinded or rolled back — could not be undone by his successor. Biden said during his 2020 campaign that he opposed capital punishment, and he vowed to push for its abolition. During his presidency, the Justice Department halted federal executions while defending existing death sentences in court and seeking new ones.
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