President Biden is the first publicly anti-death-penalty candidate to be elected president. But the closest this administration has come to reflecting the president’s values are half-measures from the Justice Department, including a moratorium on executions and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to deauthorize some, but not all, death penalty cases authorized by the Trump-era Justice Department and, thus far, to not authorize any new federal capital cases.
The Justice Department is moving ahead, however, with some previously authorized capital cases and has not issued a blanket policy against new capital cases.
The Feb. 12 front-page article “Two mass killers, but only one faces death” highlighted these inconsistencies.
The White House could allay much of this confusion and send a clear signal about this administration’s priorities if Mr. Biden commuted the death sentences of the 44 people currently on federal death row to prison sentences.
The Constitution grants the president the power to single-handedly commute federal sentences.
A blanket commutation would realize Mr. Biden’s anti-death-penalty stance and move the United States further along the path to abolition.
It would also prevent another federal execution spree such as that carried out in the Trump administration.
The commutation of federal death row sentences could be a defining feature of Mr. Biden’s legacy of, as he describes it, restoring “the soul of the nation.”
Source:
The Washington Post, Russ Feingold, February 20, 2023. The writer, a former Democratic senator from Wisconsin, is president of the American Constitution Society.
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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
