President Joe Biden has spared almost every death row prisoner in the country to sabotage Donald Trump’s plans to launch a flurry of federal executions when he returns to the White House.
Biden announced that he is commuting the sentences of 37 murderers less than a month before Trump is back in the Oval Office.
The reprieved men will now serve life in prison without parole. Only three convicts who carried out mass killings will remain on death row.
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During his first term, Trump restarted federal executions after a 20-year freeze. Thirteen people were put to death, all in the final six months of his presidency.
In the 2024 presidential election campaign, Trump said he wanted to expand capital punishment from murderers to child abusers, human traffickers, and drug dealers.
“We’re going to be asking everyone who sells drugs—gets caught selling drugs—to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts, because it’s the only way,” Trump said on the first day of his campaign.
He also called for any migrant who killed a U.S. citizen or law enforcement officer to be executed.
To expand the statute would require an act of Congress, but death penalty opponents worry that Trump would still press ahead and prioritize executions of inmates already on death row.
“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted,” Biden said in a statement on Monday.
“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,” he added.
The White House released statements of support from the families of victims as well as from religious leaders and human rights groups.
The three who will remain on death row are 2013 Boston Marathon killer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31; white supremacist Dylann Roof, 30, who opened fire on Black parishioners at a South Carolina church in 2015; and Robert D. Bowers, 52, who gunned down worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
Article 2 of the Constitution gives a president the power to commute a federal sentence, including a capital crime.
Earlier this month, Biden commuted the sentences of 1,500 non-violent offenders and pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, who was facing sentencing on tax and gun charges.
