Calls are mounting for Joe Biden to use his presidential clemency powers before he leaves office to spare the lives of 40 federal death row inmates who are at peril of imminent execution when Donald Trump returns to the White House.
Lawyers for many of the condemned men are appealing to the president through official clemency channels, urging him to commute their death sentences to life behind bars. Major advocacy groups and individuals affected by capital punishment are also making urgent pleas for Biden to act in the 10 weeks he has left in the Oval Office.
Trump has signaled he will authorize an execution spree of all inmates sentenced to death by the US government as one of his first acts after his inauguration on 20 January. The spate of judicial killings would be a continuation of the 13 federal executions carried out at the end of Trump’s first term in office.
The sudden burst of Trump executions, carried out over six months in 2020-21, was the most intense period of federal judicial killings under any president in more than 120 years.
“We are begging President Biden to save these lives, so that Trump will not have an opportunity for another killing spree – because that’s what it will be,” the Rev Sharon Risher said. She is the daughter of Ethel Lance, one of nine Black worshippers gunned down in 2015 by a white supremacist during a church Bible-study class in Charleston, South Carolina.
Risher, who is chair of the abolitionist group Death Penalty Action, said she was intimately acquainted with the “personal feelings of wanting someone gone from the earth”. But she has come to the view that to execute her mother’s killer, who is one of the 40 people on federal death row, would be wrong, because “you don’t have to kill to prove a point”.
Leading civil rights organizations are also speaking out forcefully. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has prioritized the fate of the 40 condemned men as its top priority in coming weeks, centered around a petition calling on the president to “commute the row”.
“This is the time for Biden to cement his moral legacy, by commuting all federal death sentences,” said Yasmin Cader, a deputy legal director for the ACLU.
Biden’s commutation power is one of the most concrete tools at his for safeguarding his values before he hands over to Trump. He pledged to eliminate the federal death penalty during his 2020 presidential campaign, but has since remained largely silent on the issue.
His attorney general, Merrick Garland, imposed a moratorium on all federal executions in 2021.
“Commuting all death sentences would be the one thing that Biden could do to actually live up to his stated desire to end the federal death penalty,” said Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty Action. “Once a president commutes somebody’s sentence, that cannot be undone.”
The 40 condemned prisoners are all men; the only female federal death row inmate, Lisa Montgomery, was executed in the final week of Trump’s presidency. They are held in the special confinement unit, as the federal death row is known, in Terre Haute, Indiana.
In addition to the Charleston shooter, they include the 2013 Boston marathon bomber, and the man who killed 11 Jewish worshippers in an antisemitic attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg in 2018.
Aside from the most notorious killers, federal death row also holds men whose cases are little known yet whose presence on the unit reveals deep flaws and inequities in the system. The composition of the row is infused with racial bias.
Though Black adults comprise 10% of the US population, they form 38% of the 40 under federal death sentences – and more than half of the total inmates are people of color. Some of those Black men were handed capital sentences by all-white juries.
Of the 13 people executed during Trump’s first term, more than half were Black or Native American. Two had intellectual disabilities, which should have exempted them from death under the US constitution, and two others were suffering such serious mental illness that their lawyers argued they were not legally competent to be executed.
Project 2025, the manifesto for a second Trump term produced by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, proposes that the administration should “obtain finality” for every remaining prisoner on federal death row. Trump has also called for the ultimate punishment to be extended to drug dealers and human traffickers.
“You have to believe it when Trump says he’s going to execute all 40 people,” said Kelley Henry, a federal public defender. “He killed 13 in the middle of a global pandemic, all of whom had serious constitutional issues about their sentences.”
Henry represented Montgomery, the only woman among the 13 executed inmates. Montgomery, who was convicted of murdering a pregnant woman, had severe mental illness arising from a horrifying record of childhood sexual and physical abuse.
“The first Trump administration showed it had no concern about executing people with severe mental illness, and they will do it again,” Henry said.
Henry currently represents Rejon Taylor, who was convicted of the 2003 killing of a white restaurateur. He was 18 at the time, and has always insisted that he panicked and discharged his gun unintentionally.
During the jury deliberations, an alternate juror revealed that some of the almost all-white jurors referred to Taylor as a “boy” and wanted to “send him to the chair”.
“Rejon was an 18-year-old Black kid in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was sentenced to death in a courtroom with a mural celebrating the antebellum south that depicted an enslaved person clad in black-and-white prison stripes picking cotton,” Henry said.
Lawyers for several of the condemned inmates say that the Office of the Pardon Attorney, the unit within the justice department which handles clemency petitions, has so far been responsive to their requests. That has raised hopes that commutations might be on the table.
But the final decision rests solely with Biden. Whether or not he spares the lives of all, some or none of the men will depend on him alone.
Asked by the Guardian whether executing the man who murdered her mother would ease her pain, Risher said it would not. “Truthfully, he will suffer every day he’s in prison,” she said.
“Those nine angels will visit him every night in his cell. He’s going to relive that Bible study over and over, and maybe one day he will be remorseful.”
