Pressure is growing on the White House to make something of Joe Biden’s last few weeks in office, and on Sunday it ratcheted up with a new, personal angle.
Biden was already facing calls last from opponents of capital punishment to commute the sentences of death row inmates and halt what could very well be a second Trump-led effort to accelerate the use of the death penalty in federal cases beginning next year. The president is now also seeing those calls taken on Pope Francis, the highest Catholic authority in the world and a man for whom the US president has repeatedly expressed great respect.
The Pope addressed the situation of American death row inmates in his remarks from the Vatican on Sunday as he led prayers in St. Peter’s Square.
“Today, it comes to my heart to ask all of you to pray for the prisoners in the United States who are on death row,” he said, according to Reuters. “Let’s pray that their sentence would be commuted [or] changed.”
His remarks on the issue are a sign of the impact the issue of death row inmates is having not just at home but around the world in the final days of Biden’s presidency.
The ACLU released a series of letters on Monday from a wide range of interest groups — business leaders including Sir Richard Branson and Sheryl Sandberg, faith groups, families of homicide victims, retired corrections facility staff and more — all urging the president to act before January 20.
“We have an interest in good governance, stability, social cohesion, and fairness. The death penalty undermines all of these values,” reads the letter from Sandberg, Branson and other business leaders.
It further argued that use of the death penalty by the US government “damag[es] the standing of the United States as a champion of human rights, fairness, and equal justice in the world.”
The ACLU and other groups remember well the final months of Trump’s first term in office. His administration, led by Attorney General Bill Barr, executed 13 people in 2020 after resuming the practice for the first time since the early 2000s. Five of those people were killed during the post-election transition period.
It was a spree of executions the likes of which the US federal government had not carried out in decades. Activists now fret that a decision not to commute the remainder of the federal death row in 2024 and the first half of January would mean another failure by Democrats to “Trump-proof” the justice system before the onset of the new administration.
And it would be one that would come despite Biden flexing the same powers of the presidency he could use to commute the sentences of death row inmates to free his own son Hunter from an impending criminal sentencing.
Many supporters of criminal justice reform say that the death penalty is an issue on which Biden has betrayed his own 2020 campaign promises, pointing to his low commutation rate as proof that the White House did not do all it could to move the issue.
His 2020 campaign website addressed the issue, according to records from Politifact: "Because we cannot ensure we get death penalty cases right every time, Biden will work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government's example."
“Joe Biden campaigned on a pledge to end the federal death penalty,” Branson said in a separate statement to Rolling Stone. “I appreciate that he never quite had the necessary majorities to make that happen through an act of Congress. But ... I think this is his final chance to deliver on the spirit of his 2020 campaign commitment and prevent another execution spree like we saw during the final months of President Trump’s time in office.”
“It’s less about the fact that the president pardoned his son and more about the fact that he’s only really pardoning his son when there are, in fact, many people, including Leonard Peltier, as well as several other cases... who should be taken off death row, and who are facing the end of their lives if this president does not act,” added Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spoke to The Independent in a conversation last week, ahead of the letters’ release.
“I hope that we see far, far, far more commutations and clemencies that are provided because the current administration has issued a record-low number,” the New York congresswoman continued. “And what I would hate to see is President Biden leaving office with less commutations and clemency issuances than even President Trump provided.”
