Biden Has 40 Days to Save the 40 Federal Death Row Prisoners
Multiple groups have now urged President Biden to spare the people on federal death row before Trump returns to power.
In the last few weeks, President Joe Biden pardoned two Thanksgiving turkeys and his own son. But it remains unknown if he will extend that grace to the 40 men on federal death row.
Today, U.S. Congress members Ayanna Pressley and Cori Bush held a press conference to demand Biden use his clemency powers to spare the lives of federal death row prisoners, who make up just under two percent of the total U.S. death row population.
“Today, on Human Rights Day, we call on President Biden to do the right thing,” Pressley said at the event. “State-sanctioned murder is not justice, and the death penalty is a cruel, racist, and fundamentally flawed punishment that has no place in our society.”
Last month, Pressley, Bush, and roughly 60 other lawmakers sent Biden a letter calling on him to use his clemency powers to help “the elderly and chronically ill, those on death row, people with unjustified sentencing disparities, and women who were punished for defending themselves against their abusers.”
At today’s press conference, Bush reiterated the letter’s demands. The death penalty, she said, “is an irreversible failure.”
Those lawmakers also issued Biden an open letter with the same demands last month.
As Biden’s term winds down, federal lawmakers, prosecutors, retired corrections officials, and others are calling on Biden to commute federal prisoners’ death sentences to life in prison.
This week, more than 100 human rights organizations sent a letter to Biden calling on him to commute death row prisoners’ sentences. The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund spearheaded the effort.
“While the majority of countries have abolished capital punishment, those that retain it wield it disproportionately against racially, religiously, and politically marginalized groups,” they wrote. “The U.S. is no exception.”
In separate letters, more than two dozen former corrections officials and over 150 relatives of murder victims have also urged Biden to commute death row prisoners’ sentences.
“We want a justice system that creates safety, healing, and accountability that repairs—one that is responsive to the needs of survivors and family members like us,” the families wrote to Biden in October. “By all these measures, the death penalty fails.”
.@POTUS has the authority to commute the sentences of the 40 people on death row and re-sentence them to a prison term — and he can do it right now.
— Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (@RepPressley) December 10, 2024
He must use that power before leaving office.
This is about saving lives and addressing the injustices of our legal system. pic.twitter.com/lVjACkcdOH
When Biden ran for president in 2020, he said he would end the federal death penalty and encourage states to do the same. He’s failed to deliver on both promises. While no federal executions occurred during Biden’s presidency, his Department of Justice pursued death sentences in at least two cases and obtained a death sentence for Tree of Life synagogue shooter Robert Bowers over the objections of some victims.
If Biden does nothing, he will leave those condemned prisoners’ fates to Donald Trump, who has long supported the death penalty. In 1989, he took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the executions of the innocent “Central Park Five”—a group of children who were later exonerated. In the last six months of Trump’s presidency, his administration executed 13 people—more people than the previous 10 presidents combined.
“We have never seen anything like that on the federal level,” Cassandra Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, said on a press briefing call last month. “We haven’t even ever seen anything like that on the state level in terms of the speed at which the Department of Justice tried to carry those executions out, in the aggressiveness of that litigation.”
Advocates fear Trump will initiate another execution spree when he takes office. In addition to Trump’s record, Project 2025—a 900-page policy roadmap published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation—says the federal government should “do everything possible to obtain finality” for those on death row.
On the media call, Stubbs said Project 2025 articulates a “promise to try to kill everyone on death row.” She said the only way to protect the lives of people on death row is to commute their sentences.
The federal death row’s makeup reflects the larger inequities and cruelties of the U.S. justice system. Almost 40 percent of the men are Black, even though Black people make up 10 percent of the U.S. population. According to the disability rights group, the Arc of the United States, several men on death row have intellectual disabilities—despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that prohibits their execution.
“You would not subject any of these men to execution, but they will die if you do not act,” the Arc wrote in its letter to Biden. “Morally, ethically, and legally, we believe this calls for the mercy that is your executive prerogative.”