Biden commutes death row sentences of 37 federal prisoners

CNA Newsroom, Dec 23, 2024 / 09:40 am

President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the death row sentences of more than three dozen federal prisoners, ordering that the formerly condemned inmates serve out life sentences instead of being executed by the government. 

The White House announced the clemencies on Monday morning, stating that the president was “commuting the sentences of 37 individuals on federal death row.”

“Those individuals will have their sentences reclassified from execution to life without the possibility of parole,” the White House said. 

The White House noted that the order leaves in place the death sentences of three federal prisoners guilty of “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.” Those sentences apply to Robert Bowers, who committed the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue massacre; Dylann Roof, who in 2015 killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the perpetrators of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. 

The commutations come after significant campaigns from Catholic advocates who urged the president to issue broad clemency in the waning days of his administration. 

Pope Francis earlier this month called for the death sentences of U.S. prisoners to be thrown out, praying that “their sentences may be commuted or changed.”

Also this month, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) launched a campaign urging Catholics to contact Biden and ask him to commute the federal death sentences, describing the proposal as “an extraordinary opportunity to advance the cause of human dignity.”

In November, meanwhile, the anti-death penalty group Catholic Mobilizing Network (CMN) similarly urged Biden to commute the sentences, with the group pointing to the looming 2025 Jubilee Year and describing it as “fitting that [Biden] should act on his faith and do what is squarely within his constitutional authority to do.”

In a statement on Monday, CMN Executive Director Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy said Biden’s order “advances the cause of human dignity and underscores the sacred value of every human life.”

“The system of capital punishment anywhere leaves in its wake ripples of suffering in families, in communities, and in our social systems,” Murphy said. “Indeed the death penalty’s very existence epitomizes a throwaway culture.”

The group noted that, though more than three dozen inmates were spared execution by the order, the measure “places the remaining three men on federal death row … at risk of execution in the future.”

“While we celebrate the distinctive progress that today’s commutation action brings, we will continue to pray fervently that President Biden’s bold move will spur legislative action that ultimately leads to the abolition of the death penalty at every level of government throughout the United States,” Murphy said.