On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump reiterated his commitment to “vigorously pursue” the death penalty, criticizing President Joe Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of nearly all federal death row inmates.
Trump also added to the outcry against Biden’s unprecedented move, which has elicited both criticism and acclaim.
“Makes no sense,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social. “Relatives and friends are devastated. They can’t believe what is occurring!”
“As soon as I am inaugurated, I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters,” he told reporters. “We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!”
Biden stated on Monday that he will commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal offenders on death row to life without the prospect of parole, citing his conscience and experience as a public defender.
The plan had been rumored for weeks after a large coalition of criminal justice advocacy groups, former prosecutors, and business executives wrote letters to the White House requesting that Trump reduce the sentences before taking office. This month, Pope Francis also asked Biden, a Catholic, to commute the sentences; Biden is expected to meet with the pontiff next month in the final days of his administration.
In a statement released Monday, the president stated that the commutations are consistent with the moratorium on executions set by his administration after he took office, and that “in good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
However, Biden made a point of declining to commute the sentences of three federal death row inmates involved in mass killings: Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, who gunned down nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who carried out a bombing attack at the Boston Marathon in 2013.
Despite saving the lives of the remaining 37 detainees, Biden stated, “Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss.”
Following his first term, Trump campaigned on expanding the federal death penalty, and his Justice Department executed 13 federal inmates, a record number since Grover Cleveland’s presidency in the late 1800s.
Trump has now stated that he wants to increase the death penalty to include child rapists, migrants who kill US residents and law enforcement officers, and those convicted of drug and human trafficking. It’s unclear how the president-elect would do so, and legal experts say it would necessitate congressional approval and pose significant constitutional issues.
Nonetheless, anti-death penalty groups say they are taking Trump’s words seriously.
Meanwhile, Biden is facing criticism for his death row commutations from not just political opponents, but also law enforcement organizations and some victims’ relatives.
“We thought the timing was despicable,” Tim Timmerman, whose 19-year-old daughter Rachel was killed in 1997, told Grand Rapids, Michigan-based NBC station WOOD-TV.
Marvin Gabrion, his daughter’s convicted killer, is also accused of murdering Rachel Timmerman’s infant daughter, whose body was never discovered, and is the primary suspect in three other homicides. Gabrion is now 71.
“Where’s the justice in just giving him a prison bed to die comfortably in?” Timmerman added, “I didn’t give Gabrion the death penalty. It was the jury, and I always think it’s vital to point this out: the jury sentenced Gabrion to death.”
The daughter of Donna Major, one of two South Carolina bank employees killed by federal death row inmate Brandon Council in 2017, called Council’s commutation unfair and a “abuse of power.”
“My mom’s murder is being used as a political game piece by a president who isn’t even fit for office,” Heather Turner wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. “I stand by my stance that Joe Biden has blood on his hands.”
While anti-death penalty groups applaud Biden, who has long maintained that the death penalty process is tainted, in part, by racial disparities in who is sentenced to death and executed, some argue that he did not go far enough by failing to commute all federal death row inmates as well as the four inmates on US military death row.
The Rev. Sharon Risher, board chair of Death Penalty Action, whose mother, Ethel Lance, and cousins, Tywanza Sanders and Susie Jackson, were killed in the 2015 Charleston shooting, stated in a statement that “politics has gotten in the way of mercy.”
“You cannot rate victims, Mr. President. “I beg you to finish the job, not only with the three men remaining on federal death row, but also with those on military death row,” Risher added. “There’s still time.”