Anti-death penalty organizations in the United States received an unprecedented presidential gift last Monday in time to celebrate Christmas. In one of his last decisions as tenant of the White House, Joe Biden announced that he was commuting the death sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners convicted of federal crimes. These 37 men, who are accused of murders committed between 1993 and 2019, will serve life sentences without the possibility of parole (LWOPP). That is to say: they will continue to die behind bars, but not executed by the authorities, as the arrival of Donald Trump to the Oval Office predicted. During his campaign, Trump promised to streamline the application of the death penalty and expand it to drug and human traffickers and child abuse crimes.
The abolitionist movement continues to press for clemency to reach the three prisoners whose sentences Biden did not commute, due to the seriousness of their crimes. This is Robert D. Bowers, 52, who in 2018 murdered 11 members at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; Dzhokhar Trarnaev, 31, one of the two brothers responsible for an attack at the 2013 Boston Marathon (three dead); and Dylan Roof, 30, a white supremacist who killed nine people in an African-American church in South Carolina in 2015. The Rev. Sharon Risher, whose mother and two cousins were killed by Roof, regrets that his sentence was not commuted. “I need the president to understand that when you put a murderer on death row, you also throw the families of his victims into limbo, with the false promise that we must wait until there is an execution before we can begin to heal.”
In addition to those three cases, the goal is now to get Biden to do something for “those of the four condemned on military death row,” Abe Bonowitz, co-director of the abolitionist group Death Penalty Action, explained this Wednesday in an email interview. and one of the most prominent voices of the movement. “We oppose capital punishment in all cases, because it is a failed public policy from any point of view,” he added. In addition to those convicted of federal crimes, it is estimated that there are at least 2,180 prisoners awaiting execution in the 27 of the 50 States in which the death penalty is legal.
Bonowitz, who had been working for months to force Biden’s clemency in anticipation of Trump’s electoral victory, demands that the outgoing president not give his successor, someone who “idolizes dictators and enjoys that kind of power,” “the ability to execute anyone.” On Tuesday, he said he will pursue his application “with vigor.” At the end of his first presidency, he used that power when he ordered the execution of 13 inmates at the Terre Haute (Indiana) prison, which houses the federal death row. Since 1976, only under one other president, George Bush Jr. (2001-2009), have there been executions there: three in total.
The death penalty is one of the points addressed in the voluminous document Project 2025. Written by some 400 conservative experts, it details a possible log for the second presidency of Trump, who, during the campaign, tried to disassociate himself from those ideas, despite abundant evidence of his ideological and organic connection with the project. On page 554, there is a mandate to “do everything possible to execute the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.”
Several people involved in the abolitionist movement consulted this week also regretted Biden’s decision to commute the sentences to life sentences without the possibility of review. These activists refer to the LWOPP as a “sentence to die by imprisonment,” something that, in popular Spanish, has its own graphic expression: rotting in prison. It is estimated that there are about 5,000 people in this situation in United States prisons, whose penal system prioritizes punishment over rehabilitation.
Those sentenced to death who maintain their innocence prefer not to have their sentences commuted to life in prison without parole. At least, the long and tortuous process that separates a person sentenced to death from his execution includes years, almost always decades, of reviews of his cases in the different judicial instances until reaching the Supreme Court.
200 pardons
The penultimate demonstration of why those second chances are important came last June, when the United States broke a grim record with the pardon of Larry Roberts. Roberts was on death row for the 1983 stabbing murder of another inmate and a California prison guard, crimes that, it was finally proven, he never committed. His pardon made him the 200th death row prisoner whom authorities have exonerated since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty with a controversial ruling in 1972. Since then, it is estimated that at least 1,605 people have been executed in the country, a rarity in the West.
In the batch of 37 pardoned by Biden, there are deaths related to drug trafficking, nine convicted of killing other prisoners, a marine accused of ending the life of a fellow soldier, and murderers who committed their crimes on government-owned territory. federal. There are also, Bonowitz indicates, “several [reos] with credible claims of innocence, including that of Billie Allen.” Amnesty International (AI) collected 100,000 signatures for the commutation of the sentence for a crime he denies having committed. “His case,” according to AI, “raises serious concerns about racial bias.” [en la composición del jurado]his young age at that time [tenía 18 años] and the lack of evidence linking him to the crime.” Allen is accused of having participated with Norris Holder, another prisoner whose sentence has been commuted, in a bank robbery in St. Louis, Missouri, during which a guard was shot to death. Holder planned it to get money to buy a prosthesis for his leg, which he lost in a train accident.
This week’s decision, the result of pressure from organizations in defense of civil rights and various religious leaders and congregations, led by Pope Francis, also signals the evolution with respect to Biden’s capital punishment, which in January ends more than half a century of political career in Washington. For a good part of his career, he was a staunch “defender of the death penalty,” and signed a law that increased the cases to which it could be applied. In a video from 1994 that has resurfaced these days, you can see him in the Senate defining himself as such and defending a tough line against crime with an energy from another era. In 2020, he campaigned on a promise to end capital punishment during his presidency. He did not comply, but he did order the Department of Justice a moratorium on executions at the federal level.
In 2024, the States executed 25 prisoners, one more than in 2023. This is the tenth consecutive year in which the number falls below 30, and these are figures that are very far from the golden age of capital punishment in the United States, which coincided with the turn of the century: the record was broken in 1999, with 98 executions. Bonowitz points out, however, a “concerning” trend: “We have seen states resuming the practice with prisoners who have exhausted all their appeals.” This is the case of Indiana, which killed this month for the first time in 15 years. New methods have also been tried, such as nitrogen asphyxiation, an Alabama invention, and others, such as the firing squad, have been revived to overcome the authorities’ difficulties in obtaining the drugs necessary for lethal injection. The electric chair, whose popularity declined in the 1990s for humanitarian reasons, remains an option in seven states.
“There is still much to be done, even as public opinion on this issue is at an all-time low,” warns Bonowitz. According to the Gallup pollster, support for capital punishment is, at 53%, the lowest in five decades. This proportional distribution is reversed among citizens between 18 and 43 years old, a group in which more than half oppose it. Support for the death penalty peaked in 1994, when 80% of Americans were in favor of its application.
