Dem
47
GOP
53
Joe Biden has never made a secret of the fact that he does not care for the death penalty. And yesterday, he got out his pardon pen yet again, and did something about it, commuting 37 of 40 federal death sentences to life without possibility of parole.
Who are the trio that did not benefit from Biden's munificence? Robert Bowers, the mass shooter who killed 11 people in 2018 at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue shooting; Dylann Roof, the mass shooter who killed nine people in 2015 at a historically Black church in Charleston, SC, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the survivor between the two men who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013. In his statement announcing the 37 commutations, Biden said he was making an exception for terrorists or people guilty of "hate-motivated mass murder."
There was much squawking yesterday, mostly from progressive types, about the fact that Biden did not wipe the capital punishment ledger clear. The argument is that if the death penalty is wrong, it's always wrong, and not just wrong 92.5% of the time. Fair enough, although we think this probably oversimplifies things. If Biden had pardoned everyone, including those three very bad guys, then that trio would have become a rallying point for pro-death-penalty forces. It is entirely possible that some red-state governors, like Greg Abbott (R-TX), would have sped up their execution schedules so as to show that Republicans are "tough" on crime, unlike those pinko Democrats. In other words, it is not an unreasonable supposition that, by limiting himself to the 37 less-notorious cases, Biden spared more lives than if he'd commuted all 40 sentences.
For those three, well, the end is probably near. Donald Trump was eager to start executing people upon resuming office, and now he's only got three options. We don't know exactly where the appeals of these three men stand, though if they've been imprisoned for 6-11 years, they probably don't have many legal remedies left. It wouldn't be surprising if Trump arranged for all three executions to go forward during his first month in office. Maybe his first week.
Meanwhile, Biden is apparently not done using his pardon pen. After announcing the 37 commutations yesterday, he said that his staff was reviewing other petitions for clemency, and implied that more people would be added to an already long list. Could be dozens more; could be thousands—we'll know sometime in the next 4 weeks.(Z)