A broad array of advocacy organizations and religious groups—including the Vatican—are urging President Joe Biden to commute the sentences of several groups of federal prisoners before he leaves office, such as death row inmates, marijuana offenders, and women who were sexually assaulted in federal prisons.
Biden issued a broad pardon to his son Hunter last week, leading clemency experts and civil liberties groups to ask the obvious question.
"What about everyone else?" says Mark Osler, a clemency advocate and professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law. "They could have positioned this as a principled act that covered hundreds of people who were targeted by zealous prosecutors. There is still time for Biden to mitigate the damage to his legacy that this does, but he will have to make a significant effort."
While Biden has previously announced categorical pardons of low-level federal marijuana offenders, his administration still frequently disappointed criminal justice advocates who were hoping for more based on his 2020 campaign platform. After years of inaction from Biden, the pardon of his son stood out even more.
"While I can understand a father wanting to save his son from injustice, we expect a president to have that perspective for everyone's children," says Rachel Barkow, a professor at the NYU School of Law. "It's the singling out of only his child and his abysmal record for everyone else (at least to this point) that is so jarring. Where's the compassion and the mercy for all the other people who are serving excessive sentences or were unjustly prosecuted or sentenced harshly?"
As Barkow and Osler noted in a New York Times op-ed they co-wrote in September, Biden has the lowest rate of pardons of any modern U.S. president since Richard Nixon.
Whether Biden improves his record is not a statistical question for the 40 inmates on federal death row, but a matter of life and death. Before Donald Trump left the Oval Office in 2021, his administration embarked on a six-month execution spree, killing 13 prisoners.
Biden campaigned in 2020 on ending the federal death penalty, but once in office that promise was quickly forgotten. While it imposed a moratorium on executions, the Justice Department continued to seek capital punishment in two mass-murder cases. It would be an act of either cowardice or hypocrisy for Biden to leave all those death sentences in place, knowing that the incoming Trump administration will resume executions.
On Monday, a coalition of hundreds of current and former law enforcement officials, families of homicide victims, business leaders, civil liberties and criminal justice groups, and religious organizations released letters to Biden urging him to commute the sentences of death row inmates to life in prison.
"The Trump Administration's prior rush to execute federal prisoners during a global pandemic demonstrated that a regard for justice, due process, and the rule of law did not guide or dictate their actions," one letter from 38 current and former district attorneys, attorneys general, and police chiefs said. "Their abandonment of these hallmarks of American jurisprudence—and stated interest in doing so again—requires a full commutation of all federal death sentences. In this moment, we ask you to lead by example and choose justice, mercy, and compassion for our nation."
And on Sunday, Pope Francis prayed for similar action.
"Today, I feel compelled to ask all of you to pray for the inmates on death row in the United States," Francis said. "Let us pray that their sentences may be commuted or changed. Let us think of these brothers and sisters of ours and ask the Lord for the grace to save them from death."
In addition, criminal justice groups like FAMM are calling on Biden to commute the sentences of those serving sentences that Biden himself has acknowledged are excessive. As Reason has noted, Biden's pardons of federal marijuana offenders only included convictions for possession, not selling, leaving thousands of prison sentences for marijuana trafficking intact.
More than 20 women who were sexually assaulted by staff at FCI Dublin, a notorious federal women's prison that was closed earlier this year, also have pending clemency petitions before the White House.
"We all just feel so passionately that if Biden can pardon his son, he can definitely grant clemency to survivors of this heinous abuse by federal government employees," Kendra Drysdale, an advocate with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners who was formerly incarcerated at Dublin, told The Guardian last week. "To not do that is an absolute disgrace and embarrassment."
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
However, The Washington Post reported Monday that the Biden White House "has been listening to the arguments and discussing possibly taking steps to commute at least some federal death sentences, according to multiple people familiar with the internal conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private and ongoing deliberations."
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