Activists expected President Joe Biden to take immediate action against the death penalty as the first sitting president to oppose capital punishment, but he has been silent on the issue, the Associated Press reported.
Biden previously said he wanted to see the death penalty eliminated, in stark contrast to his predecessor, former President Donald Trump who executed 13 inmates from July 2020 to January 2021 before he left office. The executions began after the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the Trump administration’s move to restart executions of inmates on death row.
Activists and lawmakers have pressured Biden to take a stance against capital punishment for the nearly 50 federal inmates currently sitting on death row, according to the Associated Press. But Biden has not taken a stance on new legislation to abolish the federal death penalty or reversed Trump policies that resumed federal executions, since becoming president.
“Biden’s lack of action is unconscionable,” said Ashley Kincaid Eve, a lawyer and activist who protested outside the Terre Haute, Indiana, prison where the federal inmates were executed, the AP reported. “This is the easiest campaign promise to keep, and the fact he refuses to keep it … is political cowardice.”
Department of Justice (DOJ) officials urged the Supreme Court Tuesday to reinstate the death penalty for the Boston Bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev. The DOJ has independence regarding such decisions,” said White House spokesperson Andrew Bates, Reuters reported, signaling that its actions are separate from the Biden administration.
Activists said they’ve spoken with officials and gotten assurance from the Biden administration that it plans to support legislation abolishing the federal death penalty, Abe Bonowitz, director of the anti-capital punishment group Death Penalty Action told the AP.
Inmates don’t think they will be executed with Biden as president, death row inmate Rejon Taylor told the AP. “I won’t say that skepticism has settled in, but I will say that most no longer feel that immediate action will happen,” Taylor said.
Source: Tampa Free Press, Staff, June 19, 2021
Death Penalty Left in Limbo Amid White House Silence
Despite expectations that President Joe Biden would take swift action against the death penalty as the 1st sitting president to oppose capital punishment, the White House has remained silent on the issue and even failed to rescind Trump-era protocols enabling federal executions to resume and allowing prisons to use firing squads that many thought the president would do on day one, reports the Associated Press.
President Biden hasn’t said whether he’d back a bill introduced by fellow Democrats to strike the death penalty from U.S. statutes, and his administration also recently asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the Boston Marathon bomber’s original death sentence.
The fact that the Biden administration chose to actively push for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s execution suggests the president’s opposition to the death penalty isn’t as all-inclusive as many activists believed.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in an email regarding the Tsarnaev decision that the Justice Department “has independence regarding such decisions.” Bates added that the president “believes the Department should return to its prior practice, and not carry out executions.”
The president could take the path of least resistance, politically speaking, by telling his Justice Department not to schedule federal executions during his term. But that would fall far short of fulfilling his campaign promise, and it would leave the door open for future presidents to restart executions. He could also use his executive powers to commute all federal death sentences to life in prison, but there’s no sign of that happening.
Granting full clemency to everyone on death row could be politically problematic for Biden and other Democrats, who have a slim majority in both the House and the Senate.
Biden didn’t make capital punishment a prominent feature of his presidential run, but he did say on his campaign website that he would work “to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.
Source: thecrimereport.org, Staff, June 19, 2021
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
