Since becoming President in January, however, Biden has gone silent, even as the U.S. Justice Department last month pushed to re-instate the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Biden’s backsliding has muddled federal policy on capital punishment, an integral part of criminal justice reform, and sent mixed signals to death penalty states, which hold most of the nation’s 2,500 death row prisoners.
Last week, the U.S. Justice Department announced a pause on federal executions; still, the moratorium does not clarify Biden’s views or move the government closer to erasing this moral stain.
Even before the moratorium, no federal inmates were scheduled for execution. The DOJ order also does not commute any death sentences or bar federal prosecutors from seeking them.
To be fair, Biden cannot single-handedly abolish the federal death penalty: A hyper-partisan and divided Congress would first have to approve the legislation. The president can, however, commute the sentences of all 50 federal death row prisoners, converting their sentences to mandatory life-without-parole.
Such decisive action would, in effect, end the federal death penalty for a generation, and send an unequivocal message to the 27 states with death penalty laws, including Pennsylvania, that this vestige of barbarism should end.
While pausing executions, the Justice Department is conducting yet another death penalty review – this one examining the permissible methods of federal executions. Given the death penalty’s systemic problems, the review is irrelevant. It’s time to end government-sponsored killing, not debate whether lethal injection, electrocution, gas, or the firing squad is more cruel.
The federal moratorium also keeps the door open for the next president to launch a rash of federal executions, similar to the 13 undertaken by the Trump Administration during the last six months of Trump’s term. They were the first federal executions in 17 years.
If Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had acted boldly and commuted all federal death sentences, the executions under Trump could not have gone forward.
Among other things, capital punishment poses unacceptable risks for executing the innocent. More than 180 people on death row have been exonerated since executions resumed in the 1970s, reports the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center. That’s about one exoneration for every eight people executed. Imagine a fatal error rate like that in a federal transportation system. “Any system where the frequency of crashes were that high would be shut down immediately,” DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham says.
Evil triumphs when good people do nothing, 19-century philosopher John Stuart Mill said.
Once an ardent supporter of the death penalty, Biden is essentially a good man who understands the death penalty’s overwhelming flaws. As long as the president continues to do nothing, however, he will prolong an evil that has made the United States a moral outlier among nations.
Source: clintonherald.com, Jeff Gerritt, July 12, 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
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde